


Turning Point

by lurker_writes



Series: Turning Point [3]
Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, I have changed everything and fixed nothing, Rated For Violence, Sorry Not Sorry, ignoring s3?, let's ignore s1&2 as well
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-11
Updated: 2020-05-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:27:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 39,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23110189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurker_writes/pseuds/lurker_writes
Summary: Vlad Țepeș arrives at Târgoviște before the thing is done, and yet still much, much too late.
Relationships: Alucard | Adrian Tepes | Arikado Genya & Lisa (Castlevania), Dracula & Isaac Laforeze, Dracula/Lisa (Castlevania)
Series: Turning Point [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1686817
Comments: 227
Kudos: 276





	1. Chapter 1

_“Oh, no, sir. She’ll be dead by now.”_

The words swung ‘round and ‘round in his mind, a meteor captured in orbit to become a new moon governing new and irresistible tides of thought.

_“She’ll be dead by now.”_

The hot tracks of blooded tears down his face were but snowmelt when compared to the furnaces of hell being stoked in his veins.

_“She’ll be dead by now.”_

He and his world collapsed down to nothingness in an instant and exploded again in a terrible promise of death and blood and fury unlike anything even he had ever brought to bear, promising to birth a new universe in which his word was law – and his word was naught but great and terrible vengeance.

_“She’ll be dead by now.”_

The humans wanted a pyre. The humans wanted _judgment_. Very well. He had been softened toward granting human desires these last twenty years.

He would deliver.

_“She’ll be dead by now.”_

Except that as the towering specter of Dracula burst into being once more in the square of Târgoviște, he did not do so among his mortal wife’s crumbling ashes.

Lovely gold hair, shorn and singed and stinking. Flesh cracked and split and dripping fat and fluids into the flames. Gasping, wheezing, smoke-seared lungs. Faint, fluttering heartbeat fading into and out of existence.

Lisa Țepeș was not dead _yet._

Every scrap of knowledge, every spark of magic, every power that was his to command bent towards this new purpose.

Lisa Țepeș was not gone _yet,_ and Vlad would move heaven and earth and hell alike to see that this singular genius, this mind and heart incomparable among all mortals, would not be wiped from the world as long as he walked in it. As a man. As a monster. Whatever the speed. For all the long years of eternity.

Lisa Țepeș was not dead _yet._

* * *

Adrian met them three bounding steps inside the castle’s great doors, and blanched even more bloodlessly pale in shock and panic.

His hands hovered helplessly above the scorched and roasted ruin of his mother’s flesh.

Comfort would have to come later. It was not Adrian’s shock that Vlad had to get control of at this moment.

They brought her to the lab. Laid her on the nearest table. It must have pained her terribly, but she did not even have the strength to gasp.

She loved it here. This room used to echo with her laughter, the delight of her discoveries. Vlad loved _her_ here. Her lightning wit. The way her eyes glittered at every new scrap of knowledge. The way she caught her lip between her blunt human teeth as she worked at a problem.

He met Adrian’s eyes over the table – over the wreckage the humans’ superstition had made of her.

The science that she’d made her life’s work could not save her, not from this.

Vlad’s claws gouged channels into the polished wood of the worktop.

Adrian trembled and shivered until his breath burst from the adrenaline-choked gorge that was his throat in unsteady puffs, rank with the fear of mortal prey. “What do we…?”

Lisa Țepeș loved a vampire, and hated magic.

Vlad pressed his palm to her chest and felt her heart. It was ready to fail at any moment.

He was not.

“We do what must be done.”

* * *

Lisa woke slowly, and felt nothing.

Her heart drummed sluggishly and strangely in her ears.

She blinked up at the ceiling. It was a formless, if familiar, blur. Her eyes closed. They opened again to too much detail, too crisp, too bright.

Footsteps approached. Soft, light whispers of sound. Very far away? Too far. Too – she had never heard such a thing.

Her head flopped over on muscles that were not weak, but did not quite seem to understand what she wished of them.

There was a head of messy golden hair splayed across the covers.

Ah. She was in the castle.

Adrian sat at her bedside, slumped over until he could rest his head on the mattress next to hers.

She thought – she thought she’d never see her son again.

She reached over to run her fingers across his hair, and as she did so, her hand brushed over her chest.

Still.

Silent.

Cold.

The heartbeat she heard jumped and sped as Adrian lifted his head, his face alight with relief, because it _was not hers_.

His smile was brilliant, bright and warm as the summer sun despite the fangs on prominent display.

Now she felt a matching pair in her own mouth, monstrous and lethal, sharp against her lips.

Adrian’s joy collapsed as she failed to conceal her dawning horror.

 _Dawning_.

No. She would never see dawn again. At least, not more than once.

“What… did he do to me?”

Over their son’s shoulder, she saw Vlad enter the room. He looked exhausted, more tired and diminished than she had ever seen him, and he carried a vessel of—

_Blood._

She could smell it.

She could smell it, and she _wanted._

No.

But she wanted.

No.

She wanted—

She never wanted _this._

Her hands clenched at the sheets, and she shredded them with her claws.

Her son’s heart raced in her ears, human and alive.

The only scrap of humanity left in this place.

“ _What,_ ” she demanded again, hissed like a wild thing, “did you do to me?”

Vlad did not smile with reassurance, nor frown with guilt, nor show any emotion at all. He glided silently closer, bearing that chalice that both sparked and promised to slake that new repulsive thirst within her, until he loomed over them both, as shadowy and implacable as death.

“The only thing I could.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original end notes: "I do know where this is going, but I think I will see what the response is before I decide to inflict any more of it on everyone. It stands well enough on its own for now."


	2. Chapter 2

Vlad and Adrian argued somewhere down the hall beyond the sanctuary of her sickroom, in furious hisses and whispers that Lisa struggled not to hear.

She drew her legs to her chest and huddled beneath the blankets. She wanted to shiver, but could not find the way to make happen what used to be completely beyond her control. In the time between losing herself in the flames and awakening in the castle, her body had become a foreign country to her.

The burns, all gone.

Bruises, scrapes? None to be found.

It was as if the nightmare she endured at the hands of those brutes masquerading as holy men were just that, and nothing more.

And yet…

Her hair that once spilled down her shoulders now curled around her ears. It was longer than it had been shorn – too long, grown much too fast – but shorter than it had ever been in her memory.

The proof that these things had happened. The only proof, beyond her mind.

She remembered – couldn’t _stop_ remembering – being choked by the smoke. The terrible way the flames crawled up her body, popped and sizzled as she was charred alive like so much meat, before a crowd hungry for—

No, not for _her_ death.

That was what had made it so sickening.

Any death.

Any witch. Any heretic. Any criminal.

Anyone.

She’d begged and pleaded that they be shown mercy until her throat and lungs were seared and she was silenced by the heat of her own pyre.

But now she knew down to her marrow, those people just wanted to watch a woman die.

Would she have thought it, had Vlad not done this to her?

Did they disgust her now because they were cruel and monstrous?

…Or because she was?

The chalice of blood was still at hand, sat at what should have been a sickroom table, but the sense and purpose of every item it held was lost on her, who’d made it her life’s work to learn the ways of healing.

Stones carved with symbols in languages she’d never read, plants she knew of no chemical use for, shards of mirrored glass, a phial of dirt.

She made the mistake of breathing, a thing she did not have to do if she did not intend to speak presently; again, she caught the scent of the blood and her strange decentralized hunger clawed at her throat. She was no stranger to the squeeze of an empty stomach – this, she felt everywhere but.

She would not drink.

She could not drink.

She had never seen Vlad, the sly old thing, consumed with thirst – or even changed by it – and she had certainly… helped him indulge.

Adrian used to turn sour and surly if a craving took him, but no more than any other hungry child.

But they simply… were.

They had not _become_ like this, not within her experience of them. They had not _changed._

If she drank of what was offered to her…

Was it that first feeding, that turned spaniel to wolf?

The true change was not mortal to immortal, creature of the day to creature of the night. What vicious alchemy transformed a person until they regarded their own kin as cattle? What became of her, when she became a hunting thing? What of everything she was, before the church and the pyre? Would Lisa of Lupu just… burn away?

The vampire that held the shape and name of Lisa Țepeș, wife of Dracula, would have a mind. She knew this.

She huddled under the blanket and listened to her husband and son fuss and bicker and curse each other’s names with ever-increasing feeling and urgency. Her teeth ached in her jaw. She felt a hollowness in her veins, in her bones, in her being.

She could not drink.

If the vampire called Lisa left the bed, took up the chalice, swept out to greet her family in joyous reunion – _‘You have saved me, my love! Now we shall be together always. Think of what we can do for the world, with eternity before us.’_ – that creature would have a heart and a mind, as surely as they did.

But would it be _hers?_

Would they notice, were it not?

* * *

“ _You_ will stay with her,” Vlad commanded, and pressed the flask of blood into Adrian’s hands. “And I will go to Târgoviște.”

He did not want to return to Târgoviște – and he desperately needed to return to Târgoviște. Lisa’s condition had barely settled before he had to go and find her first meal. There was no human blood left in the castle’s stores, but human blood was what she required. _He_ would have liked to drag back that bishop, flailing and squealing, so that he could rip his heart from his chest and tear it open with his teeth, lap clean the atria and ventricles and know that justice had been done that night. _He_ would have liked that. Lisa surely would not. But he’d met… friends… on the travels she bade him undertake. Willing donors. It had not been a struggle to find one and ask. It had only taken time, which he would rather spend at her side.

It had been… such a close thing, that night.

He would never truly settle until he’d extracted the price for such crimes, and seen the humans cowed once more that they dare not threaten what was his.

Adrian pushed the flask back into his father’s grip. “ _I_ will go to Târgoviște. You should stay with Mother.”

“Adrian! You will go, and what will you do? Attempt to reason with the crazed vermin?”

“I fear they are beyond reason already.”

“ _Yes,_ and that is why—”

Adrian threw his hands up and spun away before Vlad could attempt to pass off the flask again. He paced up and down the length of the room – a study long in disuse, but hopefully far enough away that Lisa could not entirely overhear them, while Vlad could still hear her.

“That is why we do not need you— you— ugh, appearing in a cloud of flame or raining blood from the sky or tearing apart the entire population and posting them on pikes outside the gates. Mother would never forgive it. It would be more than she can bear, and it will only drive them to further and fiercer witch-hunting.”

Vlad snarled and hissed, the shadows near him deepening and wavering in response to his rage. “You will not—”

Adrian stilled. “I will go, Father.” With those words, all of the fear, all of the nervous energy he’d been carrying with him condensed and coalesced into an anger that was silent and still and cold and poised. He was the son of Lisa, yes… but he was the son of Dracula, too.

He took one deep, slow breath. “I will go. I will watch, and I will listen, and I will find the people who plotted to do this to us… and I will kill them, that they may do it to no one else. No one but they will know it was the House of Țepeș that brought their deaths.”

Vlad sneered and started to override his headstrong, wayward child.

Adrian held up his hand to forestall him. “The people of Târgoviște will wonder if this is the work of the devil… or the hand of God, that wipes away the guilty alone. I will whisper the right words in the ears of the gossips, and they will sow the doubt among themselves. They will not rush to burn another ‘witch’ when my work has been done.”

…Adrian did not burn with rage. Adrian’s fury was an icy and fathomless thing, and more the fool he for not recognizing it sooner.

Yes, he was indeed the son of Dracula, too.

Vlad held his wife’s meal in one hand, and reached for his son’s shoulder with the other. “You will go. But, not yet. I worry for your mother. If she does not feed soon, she will fade, or go mad. She is too new to starve herself for this long.”

Adrian looked to his feet, no longer quite as fierce or as sure as he was moments before. “Life is very different now than it was even just a few nights ago. It’s a lot to take in at once.” He glanced up, eyes wide and imploring. “You can convince her.”

Vlad was… less certain, and less hopeful. They had discussed turning before. Lisa was not enthusiastic. He had not pressed the issue. He had met her as a human. He had loved her as a human. He had _respected her_ as a human. They had time.

…Until they did not.

“You say that as though I have not lost every argument we have ever had.”

“Father…”

“I will speak reason. _She_ will have to hear it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I really didn't know how that first chapter was going to go down, but it seems like there's a least a few of you out there with an appetite for misery! *waves* Probably a good thing, I mean, we are watching _this_ show. Welcome aboard my twelve-chapter plan for beautiful sad vampire families. Everything is... still terrible here.


	3. Chapter 3

Another night gone, and still Lisa refused blood. It was a fast that would be trivial if only she were not so fresh and fragile. It was not enough that she had been through a great shock the night she was turned, there was also… ‘vampire king’ though he was, Vlad Dracula Țepeș was not well-practiced in creating new ones. He hadn’t planned for it, other than Adrian, and that… he’d had help.

Adrian begged for his patience.

He did not have much left.

He did not know what else he could say to her.

He knew how she felt about hunting humans for sport – _‘The man who gave this blood is a friend, Lisa. He did it to help you.’_

He knew how she would speak to Adrian, if he were unwell – _‘Please, Lisa. I understand that you don’t have an appetite. Just take one sip.’_

He knew perfectly well that she did have an appetite, and she was starving. He saw the way she trembled as she pushed him from her – _‘My darling, you_ must. _You are wasting away. You have been through so much already. You have no strength left.’_

It did not matter. She held firm, jaws clenched tight.

She would not drink.

Vlad contemplated forcing her. He did not want it to come to that. He had already done _this,_ though he knew it was not – she had not asked him to. But truly, was it _that_ much worse a fate than murder at the hands of a horde of superstitious peasants?

He loomed over her bedside with only one question left to ask – a question that he did not wish to hear answered, because he knew.

He knew.

“Lisa, it is done! It is too late now! It was the only thing I could do to save you. _What are you so afraid of?”_

She curled herself tighter under the blankets and peered out at him with eyes that could be so much brighter, if only she would take her meal.

“I… want…” she whispered, voice hoarse from her dry throat.

He reached beneath the blanket to bury his fingers in her hair. It was still soft, but unkempt. “Yes?”

“To bite. Chase. Hunt.” She trembled beneath his hand.

He sat next to her, fit himself into the curve left between her shoulders and knees by her hunched spine. “It is because you are hungry.”

“I don’t want—” She choked on a frustrated sob. “To be an animal.”

He shushed her and drew the covers away.

“I don’t— want to _change._ ”

He took her by the chin and turned her face toward his. He could have done this softly. He could have mesmerized and enthralled her until she was pliant and content. The gentle brutality of it repulsed him. It was not his way. His fingers slid higher and caressed along her cheeks.

He preferred to be plain about the nature of all things.

“I am sorry, Lisa of Lupu.” His grip collapsed like a sprung trap, and he pried her jaws apart. “You were the one who begged me to care for mortal lives.”

He upended the whole damned flask onto her tongue.

She coughed and heaved and spluttered and splattered the both of them with the blood she tried to reject. She flailed and yowled like a feral thing, thrashed her legs and clawed at his hands and his face and left thin red slices across his skin.

It did not matter. She was starving. Her throat convulsed and she swallowed whether she wished it or not.

He released her face, and she whipped around to latch on to his blood-drenched hand. It was not a proper bite. She gnawed at him and growled, fangs sank gracelessly deep into the meat of his thumb.

_‘What are you afraid of, Lisa?’_

This.

This was what a vampire was… when young and scared and starved and weak. This was what thoughtlessly ravaged villages and caused outbursts of panicked folktales. This was what hunters congratulated themselves for killing – packs of humans in frenzied pursuit of what amounted to no more than a hungry, terrified infant. This was all that humans believed a vampire to be – fangs and thirst and violence; without reason, without conscience, without soul.

And deep down, it was what Lisa believed too.

How much effort she had put into gentling, into _taming_ , into making a man of what she thought was a beast!

She unlatched herself from his flesh with a snarl that trailed off into a whimper, and he stroked his fingers across her blood-splattered cheek.

“Oh, my love.”

She blinked up at him with eyes already less dull than before.

“Did you wish to be a martyr?” he asked her.

They sat together, quiet and still. He cradled her jaw in his palm and engraved her face into his memory.

Lisa of Lupu, that bright mortal thing that with her sharp tongue and her sharp mind, who thirsted for knowledge and feared no creature of the night.

“My love,” he whispered, and bent to press his nose into her soft, sun-bright hair. One of her hands, trembling, lifted to fall upon his chest.

Just…

Just one last time.

He seized her by the arm and shoved her away from him, held her aloft, body limp as a corpse.

“Did you think,” he growled, “that you could make a pet of me?”

* * *

Vlad tore her from her bed and dragged her through the halls at a speed that made her head spin. Her nightdress snapped about her ankles.

The orange light of the fading evening sun angled through the windows they passed, stinging her skin like too long spent out on a summer’s day.

“Vlad!” She struggled fruitlessly against his grip.

She had never before travelled through the castle like _this._ Vlad leapt down the hollow center of turrets and landed at the bottom in a crouch with his cloak puddled around his feet like a pool of shadows. He pulled her along halls that seemed to spin and invert upon themselves without ever breaking stride – if his feet touched the floor at all. He bounded across gaps, from landing to landing, as if the yawning space between were nothing to him.

This was how a vampire traversed its world.

It all came to a sudden stop atop the curving stairs in the main hall.

Vlad yanked her wrist and spun her around to seize her by the shoulders.

“You are very mistaken, _Lisa of Lupu,_ ” he growled deep in his throat—

Adrian burst from one of the side corridors, the one that led to the kitchen, skidding on the stone floor until the bunching of the carpet’s edge halted him. His sword followed shortly behind.

“—if you believe I will sit idly by and watch while you waste away so that you will not have to share in the _beastliness_ of my fate.”

“No, I—” she gasped, but her head still spun with hunger and she could not find the words. In her panic, she’d starved herself into delirium and stupidity.

Vlad glared down his nose at her, his lip pulled back in disgust.

She reached for him—

—and his shove sent her reeling back, arcing over the banister and out into empty air.

“ _Father!_ ”

Her heart did not beat, and yet somehow it rose in her chest to clog her throat. She clutched helplessly at air.

Dracula materialized out of the shadows to catch her before she hit the ground. He held her to him and bent to whisper in her ear, as softly mocking as he had been that very first evening, all those years ago.

“I should have known better than to play with my food.”

He tossed her again, and she stumbled back into Adrian’s arms.

“If you’ve such a taste for laying with _animals_ , I suggest you try the forest.”

He advanced on them slowly, obscured by his cloak and the flickering shadows. Adrian backed away, and pulled her steadily along with him.

Lisa had made a study of Vlad Dracula Țepeș, alongside his collections and his libraries, careful to absorb every last miniscule detail. It was not rage that tipped his chin that way, that pulled his lips and raised his brow.

It was a hollowed out despair.

“Get. Out. Of my castle.”

She reached for him again, as he backed them up to the opening doors.

He slapped her hand away with the back of his wrist.

“And take your misbegotten half-breed _bastard_ with you.”

The huge doors, as bound to his thoughts and whims and will as any other part of the structure, closed between them with a dull boom that rolled through her chest like thunder.

She rested her hand against the cladding of the door.

Adrian returned his sword to its sheath and sighed like all the air had just been crushed out of him.

Her hand curled into a fist, claws pricking her palm.

“We should go,” Adrian murmured after a moment, when the silence gained too much presence.

She drew back and slammed her fists into the door, one and then the other, with more strength than she’d even before possessed, a drumbeat for the rage that was just beginning to simmer within her.

For the very first time, the doors remained closed.

Adrian grabbed her wrist to stop her, and drew her away.

“He’s not coming,” he said, with watery eyes and the tragic, trembling snarl of a boy that refused to be seen crying.

Lisa stood barefoot on the steps of her home in her bloodstained nightclothes, the evening breeze tugging at what was left of her hair, and feared that her son – that _their_ son – was right. Dracula wasn’t going to open those doors to her. Not this time.

Adrian shrugged himself jerkily out of his coat. All of his movements were sharp and tense, wound much too tightly with emotion. He dropped it across her shoulders.

He did not quite look at her when he did it.

“I suppose it is fortunate,” he gasped through his tear-choked throat, “that I am just enough animal to hunt for you.”

That was the needle that pierced the false comfort of her little bubble of inaction.

She whipped around to face him. He flinched back from her.

“Adrian, no!”

He glanced up at the castle, and shied away from it as well. “I heard only enough to wish that I didn’t.”

She pulled his coat tighter around her shoulders and reached out to take one of his gloved hands in her own. Despite the blood that had been rather literally poured into her, she still felt shaky and vague and weak.

She also still felt like herself. Doctor Lisa Țepeș, from the village of Lupu. The wife of Dracula. Mother of Adrian.

Which meant, too, that she felt like the most regrettable and ignorant of fools.

“No, my dear heart. My precious boy. That isn’t the way of things at all.” She started down the steps, and drew him along with her. “I don’t think that of you. _We_ don’t think that of you. Neither of us.”

He turned back to the castle once more. “You don’t know that.”

“I _do._ ” She pulled him down until she could brush his hair aside and kiss between his brows. “I got lost in my fear when I should have known better, and I am sorry for what that’s put you through.”

Her boy wilted until he could lay his head on her shoulder and press his face to her neck.

“And as for your father, this is… this is bodies on spikes.”

“Bodies on spikes?”

She started to descend the steps again, and swayed precariously on her feet. Adrian caught her.

“To keep the world at a distance, away from the monster’s den.” She leaned more heavily into her son’s arms. “Adrian, understand that I never thought your father was a beast.”

Lisa sighed, and pulled her boy along. It would do them no good to linger here now, waiting for a change of heart. Vlad was stubborn…

…And so was she. But there was no sense in ignoring it any longer. They were both right. She had— she had to feed.

She peered back over her shoulder one last time.

“Though I do wish he would not insist on behaving as one.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so things are set in motion. I did say that I fixed nothing. Alucard may hurt beautifully... but Daddy Dracula hurts brutally and best.


	4. Chapter 4

Vlad was not sure how long he stood and watched the doors. Long enough that the banging stopped.

He covered his face with one hand and put pressure on his temples.

“What an ass I’ve been. ‘ _Get out,_ ’” he mocked himself into the silence of his oldest companion.

Very silent.

Very still.

He’d become accustomed to the sounds of living, somehow.

It was a slow march back up the stairs.

“I once glutted myself on whole villages because they committed the crime of existing where it was inconvenient to me.”

He turned back to look at the doors one last time.

“But one little human, one peasant woman…” He dragged his claws along the wall as he walked, no destination in mind. “Decides she’d like to read books and put the devil into hell, and I turn her free with a loyal guard.”

He turned to peer in an open doorway as he passed.

His study.

Her portrait.

No.

Not… not there.

He walked on.

“Ah, what a soft old fool I’ve become.”

* * *

Adrian knew the land in this area well, which he supposed was to their advantage. He’d spent a great deal of time exploring it; finding streams to fish in and rabbit warrens, patches of wild berries, caves and old dens to explore, even a log shelter that he’d built with— Well. The castle hadn’t moved in some time.

He supposed that would be changing soon, too.

And then, shut out as he was from the night courts of vampire society, they’d never find it again.

Hm. As _he_ was. His mother, turned by Dracula himself, would be welcomed if he could only find her the right place. One willing to snub _Father_ a little. But Adrian knew his social disgrace was rather more permanent, as he had more than once been reminded through whispers just a little too close and too loud to be _accidentally_ overheard – _‘he can say it all he wants, but you can’t marry a cow, can you?’_

No, Adrian— Adrian didn’t associate with vampires.

He was used to it. It was fine.

“Adrian,” his mother asked him as she trailed behind him, accustoming herself to the lightness and hardiness of bare vampire feet. “Why did you have your sword?”

“I was preparing for a hunt.”

For churchmen. In Târgoviște. Because Fa— because Dracula had given the order.

Probably best left unsaid.

“Hm,” she replied. A very skeptical ‘hm’, of the kind that normally meant he was about to be in trouble.

“I should still do that. Fa— I was told you should have human blood, but… I might hear a deer?”

He turned back to look at his mother and, for the first time since the night of the witch hunt, truly evaluate the state of her. The blood on her skin had dried as they walked, and she’d scrubbed the crust off with the back of her hands. There were little poke marks on her lips where she’d kept forgetting her fangs. Her hair went every which way – definitive proof that he’d gotten it from her. There was a reason he wore his so long. She was a bit grey, a bit drawn, a bit waxy.

But she clasped her hands together in front of her and smiled at him in that mischievous way that wrinkled her nose… even if her eyes were still very sad. “Tell me, do you think I’m ready for _my_ first hunt?”

“You... want to come with me?”

She reached out to him, palm up. “He was right. It’s already been done.” She sighed. “I admit that I feared becoming… well, monstrous. But it’s clearly not the case.”

He did not take her hand. Instead, he narrowed his eyes and looked her over more closely. “You are asking if I think you’re ready to help me run down a defenseless creature and tear its throat out with my teeth,” he said flatly.

“That’s nature, Adrian.” And she actually laughed, even if it was a queer, sad, strained little thing. “And as I was just reminded, not at all what I believe makes a monster. A wolf still deserves to eat.”

* * *

Lisa marveled at the strength and skill of her son as she struggled to keep pace with him. He moved through the forest with the ease of a creature that _belonged_ in it, hopping woodfall and ducking around trunks at speed, leaping up to perch in the branches while he waited for her.

It took a few false starts – and she would not be leaping from tree to tree that evening – but soon enough she was flitting along behind him, very fast for a human and very slow for a vampire. Being up and moving seemed to help her condition, like her body was only fully realizing it had been changed now that she was using it.

This part of her son’s life was closed to her before, a truth which she could only guess at and not really comprehend. Now, she tucked it away as the first bit of knowledge in a new trove she would gather, to improve a different set of lives. _‘Why does a vampire move that way, leaping and bounding and rushing through the night? To threaten, to stalk, to kill? Perhaps – for the joy of it, because it was_ fun.’

So much fun.

At times, when Adrian turned back to check on her she had to press her fingers to her lips to remind herself not to giggle and give away the chase.

That was another fact for her to put away – she felt… well, she felt a _lot_ , and quickly, there-and-gone-again flashes of moods.

A polecat caught sight of them and sprung away, back arched and hissing threats. Before she’d even realized what she was doing, she was hissing back at it, crouched and ready to spring. _Little scampering thing, you dare to challenge_ me?! And then it was gone, scurrying through the thicket, and her – pride? anger? – whatever it had been, it was gone too, before she could even decide what, exactly, she’d felt at all. It had been replaced by a sense of victory that bloomed hot and made her feel unaccountably smug, having vanquished a skittish woodland creature perhaps the size of a boot.

The doctor in her wondered, was it a physiological change? Or did the experience of waking up cold and with no heartbeat just break something in the human mind, and all vampires went slightly mad?

Adrian stopped to wait for her in another tree, perched in the shadow cast by the trunk in the moonlight – not that it mattered, because to her it was now… No, it was not bright as day. She was every bit as aware of the dark and the gloom as before. It was just that... she could see, somehow.

He pointed out through a break in the trees.

Some distance off, there was a hind browsing at the hips of a dog rose. Its ears swiveled and it stamped its hooves, coat twitching with the nervousness of prey.

Something new and strange in her answered with an opposing wave of excitement, coiled tight like one of Vlad’s clever clockwork springs. Yes, yes, _yes_ – hunt chase bite drink _kill_.

Adrian sprang from the tree in a blur of red.

The loud _snap_ of the deer’s neck followed shortly after.

* * *

Adrian didn’t even have time to bite before his mother was on the carcass.

She tore a swathe of hide away with her teeth and spat it onto the ground before she plunged back in, drawing down desperate, greedy gulps.

“Ah—” He reached over the body, hands hovering over her shoulders. Should he warn her, or…?

She fell back on her haunches, retching. “Urgh, that is— foul, unbelievably foul.”

“I should have said. Animal blood is… not the most enjoyable.” He pulled up a patch of moss nearby to help her wipe her face.

“I agree, you should have,” she said, scrubbing at her chin and attempting to daintily suppress the urge to gag. “Several years ago. This is what you’ve been living on?”

He glanced to the side. “It’s not so bad. It’s like…”

“Fish that’s been living in dirty water and tastes of mud,” his mother finished for him.

“Ah – yes. But at— at the castle, it was mostly pig’s blood, and— I was told that if you feed a pig enough like a person eats, it almost tastes good.”

She frowned at him, with her lip caught awkwardly on teeth she still didn’t know how to maneuver her around. “At _home_ , Adrian. Your father said that, at home.”

“Not anymore.”

“Don’t—”

“I think we should approach the lower lords, and see who will shelter you.”

That stopped her efforts to clean her face. “Us. Surely.”

He swallowed down the lump in his throat. “You’ve already been an outcast among humans because I’m not— I’ll never quite belong. Vampires are no different. I’m… It doesn’t matter that he tossed you out, you were turned by Dracula himself. That gives you… potential. An alliance won’t be hard to find.”

She leaned over and snatched up his hands. He stared into the glassy eyes of the dead doe so that he wouldn’t have to meet hers.

“My dear heart, I don’t want to be welcomed where you are not.”

“You can live like a fine lady again if you go without me.”

“A fine lady, Lisa from the village of Lupu? I’ve never been accused of such a thing.”

That drew a frown from him – she was being obtuse. “My mother, Lisa Țepeș, who Lord Dracula claimed for his wife. Lived in a castle? Had a silken gown dyed Tyrian purple like an empress of old? Is this unfamiliar to you?”

She released his hands to cup his cheek. “If it is to be a choice, I would rather have you. Suppose you succeeded in sending me off to be a pampered curiosity in, oh, Catalonia—?”

“I’d thought to ask Styria. We’ve never met, but I’ve heard talk that the queen prefers a council of women, and—”

“And then what would become of my precious boy?”

He hadn’t thought that far. He hadn’t thought beyond Târgoviște and vengeance, and then… what? There was nowhere to welcome him home.

“I… remember hearing there were Speakers in the region. Since they are no friends of the church, and I don’t kill humans to feed, perhaps… I might barter my knowledge for time among their caravan?”

It was as good a plan as any, he supposed.

“That is a much better idea.” His mother beamed at him with blood-stained teeth. “I imagine they’d have use for a doctor, too. We should go find your caravan of Speakers.”

“Are you—” He licked at his own teeth in sympathetic reflex. “Are you sure you’re ready to be among humans?”

“...No.” She sighed. “Absolutely not. It’s terrifying. I don’t want to hurt anyone. But… you would stop me, wouldn't you?”

It was awkward, having to lean over a dead deer to embrace her, and more than a little grim. He did it anyway.

“I would,” he said. “I would never let you lose yourself like that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "put the devil in hell" is about two centuries premature to be an attested euphemism for sex here... but what was I supposed to do, not use the phrase "put the devil in hell" in a castlevania fic?


	5. Chapter 5

Past the laboratories, through the libraries, Dracula walked. There was nothing to see. Little to hear; the sounds of the castle and his own footsteps, the rustle of all the quick scurrying things out in the world.

All of it, out _there_ ; and he, in _here_.

That was how he used to prefer everything was ordered. Wasn’t it?

Centuries upon centuries, he had existed in this manner, yet in the last—

Twenty years.

It was absurd that he should be so bothered by such a short diversion. There was no sense in all this upheaval.

He found himself in the mirror chamber, surrounded by all of his _old friends_. He ran his fingers over the spines of his collection, and paused at one with a rather distinctive pattern of blemishes displayed prominently on the binding.

“Ah, Nicolae. Not victorious in the end, were you?”

But Dracula could not find it in himself to savor any rush of victory, past or present.

He turned to the floating shards of his mirror and absent-mindedly scratched out the command to show him something. Anything. The towns and cities he had seen on his travels; marketplaces full of crafts, private libraries collected in curiosity and defiance, workshops of artists and inventors. The face of a human who had not greeted him in fear. Anything but this mausoleum.

Lisa had not been herself since he pulled her from the flames.

Now that all of his rage and frustration had cooled and settled, that he was no longer driven by the hopeless, impotent need to do _something_ to save her – oh, he had done something, but it was not good, it was not right, it had not helped. It had just been...

Selfish.

Selfish and pointless, like an _animal_ claiming territory, all instinct and no intellect.

An animal.

The sound of her laughter had already required work to recall before he returned to disaster. He’d travelled too far, been away for too long. He began to wonder if little details were eluding him – the exact shade of her eyes or her hair. Would she have the start of lines around her eyes when he returned to her? Would silver have begun creeping into the gold of her hair? He couldn’t have guessed at these things, out in the world as she wished of him.

But he could recall the taste of her blood.

The first time, it wasn’t even a bite. She cracked a test tube when a reaction heated beyond what she’d expected, and quite on instinct, he’d bowed his head to lick her sliced fingers. It was the first time his lips touched her skin.

Lapping at her. Like an animal.

And no matter that he’d cared for and respected her, he could never escape that awareness of the meal that waited within her.

It was a cruel edict she’d given him to labor under. Go and see the cleverness of humans – and he had. Not in all of them, but in some – in _enough_ – he found that unquenchable thirst for knowledge and change that so delighted him when he saw it in her. And in himself and his kind?

Only _thirst_.

In his desperation to preserve the bright spark of his Lisa’s life, he had extinguished it. He feared he broke her mind on the wheel of the turning. Made a beast of her, ravenous and dumb.

A vampire.

An animal.

The idle turnings of his mirror-gazing shifted again, to another familiar mortal face.

Hector.

Hector, who preferred the company of animals.

Dracula licked his lips, and was reminded of another.

Isaac, who feared nothing and would give anything if only repaid with respect and kindness.

Isaac, whose spilled blood was still dried across his face.

He felt he’d go mad in this eternity of silence, without the now-familiar drumbeat of a mortal heart to measure his nights with. But he could keep a Forgemaster and suffer no questions.

He inscribed the mirror’s next instruction with a purpose more firmly held in his drifting mind.

Reopen his castle to the members of his court. Return to his throne. Be Dracula once more.

And… summon the Forgemasters. To be _his_ Forgemasters. His little mortals, a pair there could be no reproach in keeping. One standoffish, but gentle and naive. Truly, still a child no matter his age. And one, a keen intellect disappointed by the brutishness of man. A scholar to be delighted by the gift of his knowledge.

Heartbeats in the halls once more.

* * *

Adrian led them south, toward the road to Pitești, though with no real sense of urgency driving their travels. A vampire, or a dhampir, did not need to worry about carrying provisions, or the weather, or anything except shelter from the daylight. When Lisa expressed concern about that, she felt foolish to realize the solution was quite simple for a vampire unconcerned with dignity or luxury – dig a hole and sleep.

Reluctantly, Adrian admitted to her that the caravan he’d heard of had been around Târgoviște. He’d thought to go and visit her as well as the Speakers, and see if they’d had any goods to trade or if there was, perhaps, a scholar of magic hidden in that group. She knew her son preferred conversing with those who studied the occult. With them, he didn’t have to take such care to mumble, that he might better conceal what lay behind his lips.

But if they were clever, which Speakers usually were if they wanted to live, they would not be there any longer. Pitești seemed a likely enough destination. Even if there were no Speakers, there was a market big enough that they could find Lisa some shoes.

“But how will we pay?” she wondered.

“I’ll sell my sword,” her son said, resolutely _not_ looking back at her.

“Adrian! That was a gift from your—”

“And then when the shopkeep isn’t looking, I’ll call it back.” He did look back to her then, and quickly away again from her scandalized face. “Don’t lecture me about thievery, we need coin and I’m not in the mood to be generous with anyone but you,” he added sulkily.

“I would rather you didn’t do things like that.” It was already challenging enough for her son to live as an honest man.

“Then hope we find Speakers, and that they have shoes and clothes they’re willing to spare. But don’t blame me if I have to choose your needs over a stranger. That’s how the humans live, isn’t it?”

Lisa would have liked to argue that point. Instead, she fiddled with the trim on Adrian’s coat in silence. She wanted to live in a world that was sympathetic and generous to strangers…

…But she knew she did not.

A rustle in the grass drew her attention before she could dwell on it. “A… hare?”

Adrian cocked his head and tucked his hair behind one ear, which revealed the slight point he usually endeavored to keep hidden. Lisa reached up to touch her own, and realised that her hair was barely long enough to hide the changes there. That could prove a challenge.

“Two hares, I think,” he said.

Two little scampering things to chase and bite. “Do you think I could catch one?”

* * *

Carmilla swept into their private chamber in a flurry of skirt and satisfaction. “Sisters!”

Striga sat the glass she was pouring in front of Morana with an upward sweep of her eyes. She tucked her chin deeper into her cowl and muttered. “Oh, she’s happy. This will be good.”

“Be nice, love,” Morana chided softly. She lifted her drink and gave it a little swirl, considering. “But you do seem rather pleased. Did something happen?”

“You know that miserable old man has had his castle closed to us for these last decades. No visits, no audiences, no requests.” Carmilla paraded herself across the floor, all caught up in the delight of a new design to sink her teeth into. “And no one knows why, but—” she giggled “—oh, everyone _knows why_.”

“By ‘old man’,” Morana clarified, tone somewhere between wariness and warning, “you mean Lord Dracula, to whom is sworn everyone who matters in higher society? _That_ old man?”

Striga collapsed into her seat and buried her face in her hands, muttering. “Oh, yes, good. This is excellent. This will certainly not end poorly, with anyone flayed alive and staked outside to meet the dawn. Carmilla, why?”

“ _Because_.” Carmilla kicked her chair back with a sharp little grin. “I’ve just had a message in the mirrors. The _Lord of the Castle_ will once more hear our little provincial problems. And since everyone knew why, one has to wonder – why now? What _has_ happened with that human he was stringing along and playing house with? Or the half-blood we all know he got on her, elusive little thing?”

For a short time, there was dead silence.

Morana, too, dropped her head into her hands. “Carmilla, no. We are all going to end flayed alive and spiked outside to see the sunrise.”

“You just don’t appreciate the depths of my genius.”

“I am appreciating the depths of your lunacy,” Striga muttered into her cowl.

“If you go…” Morana sighed. “If you go, at least take Lenore with you. Handling a temper like Dracula’s needs a gentle touch.”

“Oh, I _am_ going,” Carmilla promised. “And I will take Lenore. But I could not give one single thrice-blessed _fuck_ about that old miser. Can’t you see it, sisters?”

Striga and Morana glanced at each other, neither finding any clarification in her partner’s eyes.

“Think of all the ‘disagreements’ we could tidy up, if we had a day-walker with Dracula’s blood behind it to do our work for us!”

“Oh.” Morana and Striga met eyes again, rather more intent this time. “ _Oh_.”

* * *

Once they drew near enough to the road to hear any travellers upon it, Adrian and his mother fell quite naturally into a system.

After sunset, they walked alongside – but not upon – the road. They kept a leisurely pace, ambling along and allowing any diversions that took them. It was important that his mother practice hunting. She had to be able to feed herself. It was also important that she practice _not_ hunting. She had to develop the self-control needed to not sink her teeth into every neck that crossed her path.

It was going… mostly well?

And as sunrise approached, Adrian dug her a den to shelter in. Sometimes he sat at the entrance as a man, sometimes curled up as a wolf. In either shape, there had been a few passing humans that caught sight of him through the trees and crossed themselves before hurrying on. He snarled at their backs but remained at his seat.

It was nearing sunset, and he perched on a fallen tree that he’d excavated under to make the day’s burrow. Soon, they would walk on. Until then, he was free to enjoy the stillness of the evening.

It was… nice, he guessed.

The air was particularly crisp that day. There was a slight breeze that tugged through his hair. A patch of dyer’s woodruff not too far off scented the air. The birds chirped their evening calls as they found their resting spots for the night. He no longer had the hypnotic call of his mother’s heart beat, but he still had his mother. She was beginning to come into her own, developing her own altered scent and… feel, he supposed, as the impulse that animated her began to differentiate itself from Dracula’s.

No, he supposed it wasn’t all bad.

And then he perked up from his seat.

Wagons approaching, and footsteps – and with them, a chorus of voices in an accent not common among the peoples of Wallachia.

He brushed himself off, reminded himself to smile without teeth, and stepped toward the road to await the caravan’s approach.

“Good evening,” he called to them as they came near, and raised a hand in greeting. His other hand, he kept visibly and conspicuously away from the sword tucked in his belts.

The wagons halted.

The passengers all looked to one Speaker in particular, white-haired and wizened and clearly respected among the rest.

This was it, then.

“You’ve nothing to fear from me,” Adrian continued, and he allowed his lips to part far enough that his teeth would surely show.

The Speakers all shifted and rustled about in their seats. One in particular, with coppery hair and large blue eyes, leaned forward to get a better look at him while the rest leaned back.

“I am – and am not – that which you think,” he said. He hoped his mother’s policy to ‘plant honesty to harvest trust’ worked better for him than it had for her lately. “But you are safe. You have my word. Please, good Speakers. Might we talk?”

The elder Speaker looked to the one with the copper hair. For being called ‘Speakers’, they clearly managed to communicate much without saying a word.

Finally, the old man nodded. “Very well, sir. I do wonder what tale a stranger such as _you_ wishes to bring us.”

“A difficult one, I fear. Do you travel through the night, or do you make camp?”

* * *

It was remarkably simple to convince both Forgemasters to return with him. But then, Dracula thought, a lonely man needed little prodding when companionship was offered. They were hesitant around him. Their scent and their rhythms were all wrong. They offered him deference that he could not enjoy. But they filled the silence.

That was… It was enough.

Almost.

That evening found them both in the tower Hector claimed for his workroom, having a discussion that began to turn heated.

That all stopped when he entered the room.

“Lord Dracula.” And Isaac turned to bow, guided by his sharp intuition or his sharp senses or perhaps some combination of both. Turned to – but was taken aback by the sight of Dracula with a carcass slung over his shoulder.

“I’ve a task for you, Hector.” Dracula laid the thing out to be forged reverently, and ran his fingers delicately over the partially stripped skull, around the empty eye socket, up the edge of the large, well-furred ear. “Forgive me, Isaac. Your creations have a… ferocity about them. For this, I need a gentler touch.”

Both humans approached. Slowly. Slowly, but not afraid. They flanked him, all gazing down at the carrion on the table.

Hector reached out to touch it as well, running gloved fingers over the doe’s ripped-out throat. “Poor thing. Are these wolf bites?”

“Not quite.”

Both humans gazed up at him, brimming with curiosity, but not condemnation.

“Please,” Hector said. “What is it that you need of me?”

“Make her watchful.” He ran his finger once more around the eye and up the line of the ear. He touched one of her cloven hooves. “Make her quick. Make her stealthy. A warden. A messenger.”

“And then?”

“Don’t worry, Hector. She’ll know where to go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did you miss them? I did.
> 
> And so we have the section that messed up both my chapter count and my tagging. Lots of this was supposed to be in the previous chapter, but no amount of editing made it fit together right. As for the tagging, well this was _supposed_ to be a gen-fic, but no amount of anything is going to stop Ol' Drac getting just a little too invested in his wife for anyone else's purpose so I guess I'll just slap that m/f on there and give up on that dream. Thanks, buddy.


	6. Chapter 6

It was decided that they’d make camp.

Adrian, eager to ease the way with a good impression, offered his services wherever they would be had – unloading goods, clearing the ground, gathering wood. It was not the sort of work the prince of vampires was accustomed to, but as neither he nor his sire were pretending he was prince of anything any longer…

The copper-haired Speaker followed at his heels, always just out of what she must assume was arms’ reach, watching him with an intent focus that made his skin buzz.

“ _Yes?_ ” he finally asked her, perhaps a bit more arch and haughty than he intended. He just… hated being stared at so.

“It is very strange to see someone like you, walking in the day and searching for Speakers to camp with!”

Her voice was bright and cheerful, and absent of any obvious ill-will. His good breeding and the many remembered lectures of his mother on the importance of manners – mostly the lectures – had him sighing and resolving to at least try and be more charming.

She leaned in closer once more, eagerly studying his face. “Are you… a hunter?”

Something about the way she looked at him had him turning quickly away, flustered. “A bastard, I was recently told,” he said – and then shut his mouth with a click of teeth that vibrated up his jawbones. He stared out into the distance of the trees.

So much for charming.

“I didn’t realize vampires cared about such things,” she mused. It was the first any of them had directly mentioned what Adrian was instead of dancing carefully around it. “Well, Speakers do not.” And just like that, his misstep was brushed aside. “Will you help me with the horses, Sir Vampire?”

“I shouldn’t. I can make them nervous at times.”

She laughed. “You have the look of a fine gentleman that rides antsy, well bred things. These old girls aren’t bothered by much, unless you try to tip the cart over. Come.” She gestured him closer. “Make friends.”

Adrian liked horses, even if horses didn’t always like Adrian. Though disappointment loomed like a specter, he eased closer, walking a wide circle around the beasts. Slowly, he held his hand out for them. Though one stomped a bit, and the other snorted, neither reared away from him. There was no whinnying in panic or pinned ears or wide, rolling eyes. The horse nearer to the Speaker stretched out its neck and nosed, careful but curious, at his open palm.

His chest squeezed with long-familiar but rare relief, the kind he always felt when a creature didn’t immediately reject him for being strange, just feeling _off_ somehow. He sighed and stroked the horse’s face. She nickered and butted her big head into his hand.

“So you _are_ a friend, after all,” the Speaker said.

His head jerked up. He hadn’t realized – he should have realized – why had he not known that he was being tested?

Whatever the Speaker saw in his face, it brought a grin to hers. “I’m Sypha Belnades,” she said, eyes alight, her hand planted in the center of her chest.

When Adrian attempted to name himself in turn, all of his words tangled into a briar thicket in his throat. Alucard, as some called him? He didn’t want to define himself by Dracula, even if he currently felt the absence of his father like a fresh wound. Adrian _Țepeș?_ The half-breed son, the shameful son, the _rejected_ son?

_No._

“Just… Adrian,” he managed to choke out.

The Speaker called Sypha accepted his words with a finger pressed to her lips and a thoughtful little ‘ _hm._ ’

“I—” Now that he had earned their trust, some time after he thought he’d had it, it seemed a poor decision to test it any further. “I’m not travelling alone. There is another with me, who will be waking soon. You are all safe with her as well, I swear it.”

Once, he might have sworn it on his good name, but now he wondered if he’d ever had one.

“With her as well, hm?” Sypha made a great show of thinking, arms crossed and rocking her weight from heel to heel. “And who is ‘she’?”

He should have mentioned it before, but Adrian didn’t see any need to sound so disappointed in him.

“My mother.”

“Oh!” From the way Sypha straightened up, whatever she was expecting, it hadn’t been that.

“I’ll get her now.” He considered how best to buy a little more of their goodwill. “She’s a doctor. A very capable one. We have no medicines with us, but if anyone is injured or ill—” He pulled at a lock of his hair, embarrassed. “I nearly said, ‘she would be willing to treat them.’ But no, she will _insist_ on treating them, however she can.”

“We do know how to tend ourselves,” Sypha said – though she neither looked nor sounded as offended as her phrasing tried to imply.

“I am sure you do. But…” One last dollop of honey, to sweeten the prize. “My mother knows many things which have long been forgotten.”

“She’ll _awaken_ soon? Strange to consider a vampire doctor.”

“Mm. That’s – I’m not certain how much of that is my story to tell.”

Sypha clapped her hands, once, with a reassuring little grin. “Well! Go fetch your mother while I unharness these lazy things, and then we will hear what she has to say.”

The Speakers had made their camp on the far side of the road from his mother’s shelter. He wished to dash right to her with all the urgency he was capable of – but he knew that a display of his abilities was no way to win human favor. He reached the little den he’d dug and crouched down to peer inside.

His mother sat very primly in his coat and her dirty, bloodstained gown, with her hands folded in her lap and her legs tucked to the side.

“I was listening,” she said, voice low and soft with a fond sort of pride. “But I didn’t want to show myself before you deemed it safe.”

“I believe it is safe enough for now,” Adrian said, and offered his hand to help her up. “What do they have to fear from a gentlewoman as generous and refined as you?”

“Oh, no.” She suppressed a little laugh. “Is that how we’re playing it? I shall do my best.”

And she emerged from beneath the fallen trunk into the cool night air. He helped her to dust herself off, as best he could.

“I have never seen anything else from you.” It was, maybe, hollow reassurance; he meant it entirely, nonetheless.

“Oh!” she breathed, and took his face in both hands. She pulled him down so that she could lean up and kiss his forehead, a familiar gesture made just a little new and strange by the coolness of her skin and the shape of her teeth behind her lips – but despite those changes, she was still his mother.

“Dear child, I am very afraid that you have. But we’ll muddle through together, won’t we?”

He gave her his arm, and together they walked back toward the road and across it—

Until his mother froze in the middle, between the tracks of cart wheels, stiff like a corpse with her lips drawn back in a snarl to prominently display her teeth.

Firelight burned in her eyes.

Adrian tried to put himself in front of her, block her sight, _something_. She clutched onto his arm with such a desperate strength that he feared he’d have to break her fingers to get himself free.

“Mother! It’s all right, this is just—”

A vampire did not _need_ to breathe, but she did, in arrhythmic little wheezes through a worryingly tight throat.

_Stupid, stupid!_ How could he not have realized— how could he have been so dim—

The Speaker elder from before approached them slowly, carefully waiting until her eyes began to track him as if she were a spooked horse.

Decisively, he planted himself between her and the flames. “Apologies, my good woman,” he said – softly, soothingly. “We had no intent to frighten you so.”

His mother’s body quaked against his side. His forearm felt like it might snap in her grip at any moment. A great tremor worked its way up her spine.

She relaxed marginally.

The Speaker waited patiently, and Adrian hovered guiltily, and by small measures her fear worked itself from her body in a series of shaky fits.

Finally, she fell limp against Adrian’s side.

“Are you with us once more?” the Speaker asked.

“Yes,” she croaked. “I apologize. I wasn’t expecting—”

“No, no,” the old man insisted. “We have done the injury to you. Shall we smother the flames—”

“No.” His mother raised one hand, still struck by faint tremors. “I wouldn’t deprive you of light. If I face away, I believe I will be fine. Only, may I have a moment to settle myself?”

Adrian glared at the Speaker in challenge – but he needn’t have.

“As long as you need,” the elder assured.

They resumed their walk, much more slowly, at times with long pauses between one step and the next. Adrian noted an increase in the general shuffle and murmur created by a group of humans in one place. He felt a bubble of annoyance rising in his chest – until he realized, the layered sounds of a quiet gathering helped to hide the crackle of the flames.

Finally, _finally_ , they settled themselves down just outside the gathered circle of Speakers, facing away from the fire.

His mother closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and clutched his hand in hers.

“I am a doctor from the village of Lupu,” she began, voice clear and strong. “My name is Lisa Țepeș, and I _am_ the wife of Dracula…”

* * *

The newly revived deer was soon up and ambling about. Though many – perhaps most – vampires held a distrust or disdain towards this particularly human form of magic, Dracula felt it was a remarkable thing to watch a Forgemaster at work. Like artisans of death, no two approached the task exactly the same, and so each left their little marks on their creations.

Hector’s were, by nature, companions and not champions – though he certainly could make creatures to fight. He just didn’t want to.

“Do your task well,” he told the doe as he stroked its fur and patted its flanks.

“Do not worry, Hector,” Dracula said. “She goes to do peaceful work.”

The deer shook off her admirer and, after a brief moment of quivering stillness, bound out the windows for use by flying things and down the parapets. She traversed in great leaps punctuated by flashes of blue light not unlike that of her forging.

“…She _is_ quick,” Isaac admitted as they watched her go.

It was only a few more leaps before she was into the trees and beyond the sight of even Dracula’s eyes.

Once she was gone, Hector sighed. “Lord Dracula, I – ah – forgive me if I’m impertinent in asking, but I went down to your stables earlier, to see if I might do anything to fortify your herd, and—”

“You do not need to justify yourself,” Dracula admonished. “You are _of_ my court, not imprisoned by it. You are allowed in the stables.”

“Yes.” Hector gave a jerky little bow, probably to cover the embarrassment his jittery heart hinted at. “Only, while I was down there… Why is there a mule? And a fine saddle that looked to fit it, with gilded barding, and—?”

“Ah.” Now it was Dracula’s turn to sigh. He glanced aside to attempt and hide his own melancholy grimace. “It was Adrian’s. He preferred to ride in the day, but never could find a palfrey that didn’t dance out from under him. Ride out on it, if you wish.”

“Your son’s— are you quite certain?”

Dracula waved away his concern, and turned to leave. “The creature’s of no use to me. But do be warned – it loves only one man, and _will_ attempt to kick your jaw off sideways.”

“That explains why it was in the back,” he heard Hector mumble to himself as he walked away.

Isaac, meanwhile, drew up beside him – though he had to considerably lengthen his stride to do so. “If you would permit _me_ to ask, my lord, may I have a moment of your time?”

“I retire to—” _my study,_ he nearly said, before he remembered Lisa still enshrined above his writing desk. “…the lower library, off the gallery hall. You may accompany me if it pleases you.”

They walked in silence for a time, over bridges and down curving tower stairs. While he would normally just drop down the empty central column, in consideration of Isaac, Dracula kept on his feet and shortened his stride.

“Why _have_ you summoned me, Lord Dracula?” Isaac asked as they reached the bottom step. “How shall I serve?”

“To be a Forgemaster. We did discuss this.” It was a frustrating question, one that dropped a weight of weariness onto Dracula’s shoulders, and yet… he could not prevent just a whisper of fondness from creeping into his voice.

Isaac. Always thinking. Always questioning. So driven by dissatisfaction with the world, so firm in his will to be above it. Purer. Wiser. Better.

“And yet, you have no forging for me to do. I know that the mind of Dracula is not an idle one. I know that you do not act without purpose. So I ask again, why have you summoned me, my lord?”

Ah, to be eternally caught out by clever little humans.

The doors of the lower library swung as if opened by invisible hands as Dracula approached. This particular room had not just books and scribe’s tables, but a cluster of seats and couches arranged around a spot where the heating pipes broke through the floor and were encased in a box of elaborately carved wood. He’d once favored it as a place to entertain, long ago. It was pleasantly warm – that vampires tended toward the ambient temperature did not mean they didn’t enjoy warmth – and the heated tabletop served well as a place to bring canisters of stored blood from iciness to a more human temperature. Indeed, all the drinkware of a modest, huntless morning meal still sat ready for use in a glass-fronted cabinet.

Dracula melted into _his_ seat in the arrangement, a near-match to the one in his study which was, of course, the chair he liked best in all his castle, in the one room he could not bring himself to enter. That great weariness pressed further upon his spine.

“You’ve caught me out. Perhaps, Isaac, I merely wished for… a friend. Can I still call you that?”

“My friendship is not a fickle thing. I hope I have not given you cause to question it.” Isaac did not follow to sit immediately. He studied the room, from the bookshelves to the cabinet. “When we met, you carried yourself as one fulfilled in life. Now you walk as if the doom of eternity is upon you.”

In answer, Dracula could only dredge up a sigh.

Isaac studied him carefully. He felt terribly exposed – nothing escaped the scrutiny of the mind behind those quick dark eyes – but… that was why he’d summoned this man particularly. To once more experience the horrific ordeal of being known.

Whatever Isaac saw, it caused him to turn to the cabinet and open it in a series of sharp, decisive motions. He selected a shallow vessel – where had that come from, a tribute from Cho? – and rubbed his finger along the rim to test its cleanliness.

“I beg you,” Isaac said as he at last came to claim the seat next to Dracula’s, a little lower and a little plainer, but a place of honor nonetheless. “Unburden yourself to me, and let your worries plague you no more.”

“I fear these thoughts will plague me until the end of my existence.”

There was skepticism in Isaac’s gaze. He put down the dish, pulled back his sleeve, drew his knife – one quick slice carved a red line down the top of his arm. He turned and flexed his wrist so that the blood flowed freely down and dripped off the protrusion of his ulna into the waiting vessel below.

“The pain brings clarity to me,” he said to forestall any coming objection. “Let my humble offering bring clarity to you, as well.”

“I don’t deserve this kindness,” Dracula objected despite his attempts to prevent it.

“That is for me to judge.” Isaac flexed his fingers to encourage the continued flow of blood. “I beg you one last time, lay your burdens before me – allow me the honor of being worthy of them.”

The _honor_. Worthiness. As if there were ever a question of it!

Dracula seized Isaac’s hand and hauled the man to him, licked the wound clean with a growl like the beast that he was – though he followed with a whisper of intent meant to stop the flow and seal the skin.

He raised his head and shoved Isaac away from him.

Even that meagre mouthful, more a taunt than a meal, heated the weight of discontent within him to a painful, molten thing.

“I have _destroyed_ my wife,” he snapped.

Isaac placidly rolled down his sleeve.

“I turned her, fully aware that she did not wish it – fully aware of the endless hell of thirst that I have condemned her to.” Vampires did not need to breathe, but still Dracula’s chest heaved raggedly. “But she would not drink. She would have starved herself to nothing, no matter how sweetly I begged. She would not live for me.”

He took up the dish and consumed the blood caught there, too – messily, smearing red across his lips and teeth.

“So I told our son to make ready to leave. I forced your gift on her. Enough to finish my work. Enough to hold fast the change. And then I hauled her through the castle. I battered and terrorized her and threw her into our child’s arms. She holds no love for wickedness or monstrosity and I sit enthroned as the pinnacle of both. I made certain that neither would soon forget. I cast them out from their only home.

“If she refused to survive for me, I tried to force her hand. I left them nothing but each other. I tried to make her live for him. Have I succeeded? I do not _know_ , only that I have paid for the chance with everything I held dear.”

He slumped forward, exhausted by the conflicting tides within him. His eyes were red with the force of his self-directed fury, yet his face was wet from his despair.

“There is nothing left for me here but that which I tired of long ago, and yet… how can I retire from the world when even a shadow of her still walks in it?”

There was a long stretch of silence before Isaac made a low, thoughtful hum deep in the back of his throat.

“I have long thought that there is no possibility of love, in such an impure world,” he said. “And yet here I sit with a genius that calls himself a monster, but displays a depth of devotion that calls into question everything I have ever believed.”

Dracula spat a noise somewhere between a scoff and a bitter laugh, a harsh rush of air that ruffled the locks of his hanging hair.

“My lord. My _friend_ ,” Isaac continued. “You already know that as long as she walks in this world, so must you.”

Dracula tilted his face up and peered out at him, one bright red eye through the shadows of his hair.

“So what can we do, that you may live as well?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have been sitting on that info about the sequence of events since chapter two, and it has been both wonderful and agonizing to hear your speculations and not vomit spoilers everywhere.
> 
> I do not know if Isaac is the friend Drac needs right now, but I do know that he would be the very last friend the old man had, no matter what.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Be warned, it is a violent one.

It was in her favor that Speakers abhorred violence and prized honesty, Lisa reflected as she dared to peek over her shoulder and brave the flames just to see her audience’s faces. All were pensive. None were pleased.

She squeezed Adrian’s hand. Even the meager heat that leached through his gloves from his naturally cool hands felt like it would scorch her now, with the crackle of a fire behind her. Though he sat in front of her, facing back toward the gathered Speakers, he didn’t meet her eye. His attention was firmly fixed on them – his spine straight, shoulders held high and rigid, lips parted to show a warning hint of fang like a mortal man might reveal a bright flash of polished sword.

“—and now, we have wandered to you. As we swore, you have been safe with us. If you cannot, in good conscience, aid us, at least let us go in peace.”

“To aid you…” The elder from before, the one who had been so patient with her, spoke. “That is something that we must first discuss among ourselves. I cannot agree on everyone’s behalf.”

“There is nothing _to_ discuss.” That was the young woman – nearly a girl – that had happily teased Adrian earlier. The words burst from her like a poorly fitted cork over a volatile mixture – disastrously. “We can’t. Not _Dracula’s_ —”

“I see parentage matters to Speakers after all,” Adrian sneered. “I don’t know why I bothered to believe differently.”

“I think we _should_ ,” another of the Speakers joined in, one who had been silent ‘til then. “But I don’t know if we can.”

“Arn!” the girl snapped.

“Some of us care for different stories than you, _Sypha_.”

“Peace, please,” the elder begged them.

“We can’t leave a woman barefoot and undressed on the road,” the one called Arn said. “That isn’t our way. But we only have robes and sandals to spare. If we dress a vampire as our own and then she attacks someone…”

“I won’t be attacking anyone.” Lisa took care to emphasize the point. “The only creatures I’ve hunted since I awoke were all animals. And even if I were inclined to take from a human, there’s no need to hunt or kill to do it. A few mouthfuls of blood does no more than leave a willing person hungry and a bit lightheaded.”

There was a deep silence at that. She couldn’t help but laugh at that, lightly and, yes, perhaps a little mocking. “For twenty years, I have been Lady Țepeș. I may be freshly turned, but I am sure I know more of vampires than you.”

“But the story—” Sypha objected.

“If we hold words more dearly than lives, then what good is the knowledge we have collected?” the elder asked her.

“ _Dracula_ —” the girl insisted.

“I already knew this,” the old man said, and Lisa felt the weight of many eyes upon her back. “Because I was there. Though I sent the rest of our group out of the city to safety, I stayed – that there might be one witness not cheering a woman’s brutal death. And so I heard you on your pyre, begging for your husband to show mercy… and when he stepped from the flames, I saw his fury and his grief. Yet, everyone who was gathered there survived the night. He seemed to care only for saving you. And so, I think—”

“No, don’t bother,” Adrian said, his face drawn, his voice flat and quiet. “We are obviously not welcome. We should continue on.”

She recognized in him now a plethora of signs to his anger that she never had before – not only the tightness at the corners of his mouth but the way they twitched back and relaxed to let his lips resettle over his teeth, not merely the size of his pupils but the way his eyes were fixed and still to a degree impossible in humans. She’d often found him a difficult child to read when he wasn’t happy, while Vlad had sometimes called him alarmingly sensitive. Now she wondered if vampires, though born from humans, weren’t speaking an entirely different language.

It was a difference that neither side made much effort to understand – and her poor dear boy was trapped between, inscrutable to both.

“Adrian, honestly,” she scolded gently. “I have had this conversation with your father endlessly, must I now have it with you, too? Have pity on the small-minded. They cannot help their ignorance.”

Lisa believed in aid and tolerance. Lisa believed in fostering understanding and expanding minds. Lisa was not above striking with the sharp edge of her tongue when confronted with willful stupidity.

“Small-minded?!” The girl’s voice snapped like frost.

Lisa turned slowly on her seat, straight-backed and proud. She saw much the same thing she had in the square of Târgoviște – the face of a young woman different from her only in that she clung to some superstition for meaning, staring back through the wavering heat from the flames.

“What do you know of Vlad Țepeș, that you can so easily condemn him? What great terrors has he unleashed upon you? _None_ , but a fortnight ago, you slipped from a city to avoid a mob while the good people attempted to burn me alive.”

“There are stories…” Sypha said, slowly.

“There are stories.” Lisa did not curb the derision from her tone. “Better to trust your myths and legends than what you see with your own eyes, naturally. What a fool I was, to tell my husband he must go see the good in the world and its people for himself, when all he needed was to hear the third-hand rumors of some two-faced, sanctimonious beggars to know it was worth nothing at all!”

“So you were… you were changing him, you were turning him to—”

Lisa laughed, sharp and short and bark-like. “Oh, you poor girl. There is no alchemy to change a man’s heart for him. There’s only knowledge, and through it, understanding. Whatever ills cost his faith in people, they were not mine to fix. I only scolded him for his endless brooding and booted him out into the world to see it. Whatever he fixed, whatever he changed, he did that for himself.”

“I apologize for my grandchild,” the elder cut in before she could, and turned to fix her with an admonishing stare. “We all have tales which speak to us more than others, but I fear those that Sypha favors have made her quite stubborn on certain matters.”

Lisa glanced at the man. “I can’t fault your will,” she told Sypha directly – she did not treat young women as objects to be discussed, no matter how quarrelsome they were. “Only your judgment.”

The girl, with her fierce eyes and her hair the color of the flames, stared at her from over the fire, pursed her lips, and offered her a nod.

“Please,” the elder said after a tense moment of silence. “Come with me. I will offer what I can from my own possessions, so that we need not debate the matter any further.”

Lisa turned to glance at Adrian over her shoulder. He tipped his head to the side and gave her a tiny shrug. The old man seemed harmless enough – but then, the Speakers had seemed perfectly polite, even to a pair of vampires, until Vlad was mentioned. And even then… the problem seemed to be with one Speaker alone.

“Please,” the elder asked again. “It would ease my guilt considerably to aid you now, as I have regretted deeply that I couldn’t aid you then. Our youngest may not remember it clearly—” he glanced to his granddaughter with a heavy look in his eye “—but to me, it does not seem so long since we lost one of our own to such accusations.”

He came to offer his hand up, though she hardly needed it. She took it anyway, with lowered eyes and a bowed head. “Thank you. I’m— very sorry for your loss. It’s an ordeal that none should have to suffer through.”

“And yet, too many do. Which is why,” he said, voice rising with a chiding edge, “we must remember to be generous and kind, for the world often isn’t.”

Lisa paused to look to Adrian. He lowered his eyes to indicate that he would stay.

“No, please,” she heard him say as they left the circle of the firelight. “Do stay on your side of the fire. I am _Dracula’s_ spawn after all – I can hardly be trusted.”

* * *

It was dark and drizzling in the village of Lupu.

From deep under the shadows of his hood, Dracula stared over the burned-out ruins of the home he had built for her. It had been no castle, but lovely all the same, with the rosette window and the polished wood floors, the beds of her herbal garden.

It had delighted her, the day she took up residence. _We’ll be so happy here_ , she had laughed and promised him.

The next time he saw it, it was smoldering ruins, and she was…

Two sets of footsteps approached him from behind.

He pulled a cloth from his coat and dabbed his face clean.

“Lord Dracula,” Isaac said from his right. Soothing. Full of promise.

And Hector, to his left – “We’ve found what you asked. The one who caused this.”

He ran his fingers along the grain of the stave in his hand. He gave this up long ago, he thought. He ceased his dealings with the world outside, and so the world outside ceased dealing him slights and treachery. And then— and then— a brilliant, bossy woman who banged on his door with a bloodstained dagger.

His burned and broken wife.

The world had never before dealt him such treachery as this.

He would remind the little people of Wallachia – the squirming peasants and the crowing merchants and the pestilent churchmen – he would remind them all of whose law they truly lived under.

He pulled the sharpened end of the stake free of the sucking grip of the ash and the mud, and turned in a sweep of black.

“Show me. I have left the vermin run fat and feral for far too long.”

Isaac answered with a graceful bow. “This way, my lord. Let us put your holdings to rights.”

There was no sound but the rain and two pairs of mortal feet. Windows darkened in their wake. Animals fell silent and cowered. Crows gathered in the trees, flocks upon flocks of sharp beaks and glittering eyes.

All felt the oppressive weight of it as he passed – Death had come to Lupu.

His Forgemasters led him to a ramshackle cottage at the end of a rutted dirt lane. There were bloodied bandages tied around one of the crooked fence-posts. The garden held more poisons than it did remedies, all of it overgrown or in shambles. And in the meager shelter of the drooping eaves stood a young man – a farmer, perhaps – and a stoop-backed crone with a fist full of useless weeds.

Both froze and trembled at his approach.

“Which one?”

“The woman,” said Isaac. “She claims to be a healer.”

“Yes,” agreed Hector. “But she likes to poison cats.”

“Are you sick, stranger?” the hateful creature croaked at him. “Are you needing a remedy?”

Dracula melted to shadow and rushed forth to loom over the pair, blooming forth like a great dark bruise upon reality. “Oh, yes. A balm for that which you have injured,” he growled, wrapping his claws around the fraud’s throat.

“Oh God, oh please.” The man fell back against the wall of the house, gasping and trembling and reeking of piss.

Dracula sneered as he swept aside his cloak. “Your god cannot help you now.”

“I don’t want to die!” the useless thing continued to gibber.

“That is unfortunate,” Dracula told him, soft and low and mocking.

He hauled the woman to himself and lifted her off her feet. Her fingers scrabbled uselessly against his hand. He held her out to show the man, her eyes bulging in panic, her lips going blue, and shook her just a little. Like he was scolding a child. Like he’d had to take away one of Adrian’s toys.

“Then you shouldn’t have let this fraudulent hag set the hounds upon your doctor. Should you?”

He hurled the woman down the path. She landed with a crack and a shriek and rolled until she was pinned by Isaac’s boot.

“Run to your home,” Dracula told the farmer. “Run to your home and tell all your little people what they have called down upon them – that Dracula rises from his long slumber. She begged me to be good to you. She begged me to be kind. To show you mercy. Improve your lot. But there is no saving swine and vermin, is there?”

“Hu— who?” the man asked in a trembling whisper.

“ _Who?_ The woman you cheered to throw on the pyre. The doctor who tended to all of your ills. _My wife_.”

The man cringed away and squeezed his eyes shut, gasping through clenched teeth.

Dracula stepped back and allowed him room to escape, if he dared get that close to fang and claw. “Run.”

The farmer need not be told thrice.

He turned his attention to the woman still pinned under Isaac’s heel. Hector had crouched down to prod dispassionately at the break in her shin with the claw of his hammer.

Perhaps, among her many other crimes, she also should have poisoned fewer cats.

“I think I will put you in the road,” Dracula told her. He grabbed her up by the back of the neck and let his claws bite deep into her shoulders. “So that every last wretch that lives here must pass the spot every day and remember what you brought upon them.”

“She was a witch!” the woman struggled to gasp.

He dug his claws further into her flesh. “She was a queen, and you tried to have her killed so that you might once more defraud these people with mutterings and pig shit. So now, you will pay the price for your treason.”

He planted the stake deep into the ground between the ruts of the cart wheels.

“They tried to burn her alive,” he told the woman now kicking and struggling in his grasp. “And so I think I will leave you alive also. I will spike you up that you might live for hours. Or, mmm.” He squeezed her jaw until something cracked under his thumb. “The rain shows no sign of stopping. Perhaps I will force your mouth open to the sky. You cretins like to baptize your witches with fire, but of course, you are a good, _faithful_ woman, aren’t you? So let us see how long until you drown.”

The woman’s shrieks cut through the night like lightning.

None of the others left their houses.

He was not surprised.

There was no honor among filth.

* * *

Trevor Belmont followed a rumor that traveled rapidly, in hurried gallops and terrified whispers, back along the roads to Târgoviște.

There were embellishments, yes. Every place nearer had had the news longer, and the details grew more gruesome in each retelling – or perhaps, every place further lost some element of the story that was considered too horrible to speak aloud. But the core of the story was always the same.

Dracula prowled the country once more.

He didn’t know what he thought – that he, having ranged alone and wild since the age of twelve, would finally be the Belmont to put a stake to the lord of shadows, and all the good people of Wallachia would remember the protection his family had always meant to them?

Not fucking likely.

No, probably Trevor would, like most of his family before him, fall upon their ancestral enemy’s bloodstained teeth and claws. And thus would end the noble Belmont line, a proud history snuffed out with one last stumbling drunk.

And what would happen to the good little people of Wallachia then, without a Belmont to save them from the dark?

He didn’t— he didn’t fucking care.

But Belmonts hunted monsters, whether they were thanked for it or not, and so Trevor followed the sobs and the whispers and the doors bolted earlier and earlier in the night, until he came at last to one miserable little village full of peasants that huddled trembling inside their homes and dare not come out for anything.

Not even to remove the corpse piked up in the middle of the road like the world’s worst scarecrow, as the things hopped upon its skull and pulled shreds of flesh away from around its eyes.

And just behind it, the collapsing ruins of a burned cottage.

“No! Don’t— don’t touch her!”

A man burst from one of the nearby homes just as Trevor took a step forward.

“You can’t touch her!” he insisted, eyes wide and wild. “You can’t touch her. We’re cursed. He cursed us. We’re— you can’t touch her.”

Trevor slid his hand under his cloak and onto his whip. “What happened here?”

“We’re cursed. He cursed us.” The man was shaking violently, teeth clacking together as he spoke.

“Who cursed you?”

The man stared right through the corpse and the ruins and maybe eternity, for all Trevor could tell. “It were him. He cursed us. I saw him. You can’t take her down. We tried to take her down. Mihal and his boys went out and tried and there were – there were things in the night and blood and screaming and they never came back. They never came back and then there were more. Even if you touch her in the day, he knows. He knows and the creatures come and they rip you from your bed and then there are more of them. We all have to look at her. Can’t take her down.”

“ _Who?_ ” Trevor prodded, clenching the handle of his whip more tightly in his fist.

“She called her a witch and sold her to the church and the priests came to burn the doctor alive. And he came and he knows and he cursed us, he cursed us— oh, _God_.” The madman sobbed into his dirty fists.

And Trevor stared out at the crumbling cottage and he could see the flames and smell the smoke, the singeing hair, the burning flesh, hear the shrieking – _God_ , the shrieking – and all the good people shouting and jeering that the witch-family was dead, the devil-family was dead, the people who had only ever helped, the only people who had ever loved him, trapped like rats and cooked alive to cracked bone and charred meat that he found picking through the ashes.

“Shouldn’t have done it, we shouldn’t have done it,” the broken farmer rocked and gasped. “Never should have touched her. Dracula’s wife. We’re all cursed. We’re all… we shouldn’t have done it…”

The words dropped onto Trevor’s shoulders as an unbearably heavy burden, laden with a hundred-thousand things he didn’t want to look at except through the comfort of a bottle; because the Belmonts saved people, the Belmonts hunted monsters.

It was what he should have done.

But these people— _these people_ — with their witch hunts and their burnings and their…

His father had once told him that the Belmonts and Dracula, their fates were tied together. Inevitable. Inescapable.

Witch burnings.

Trevor dropped his hand from his whip. “Well. Shit.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so Isaac and Hector are great at helping.
> 
> See this is why I had to take a break to write a sexy prequel. No one is having a good time here and that includes me.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: some discussion of Lisa's treatment at the hands of the church. not graphic, but still unpleasant.

The castle was less quiet with all the little bats coming home to roost, yet Dracula found it did nothing to alleviate the emptiness of the place.

Soldiers returned and donned his colors once more. They took up their posts gladly to escape whatever holes or hovels they’d been secreting themselves away in, for they had uniformly been turned by lesser vampires who had themselves been turned by lesser vampires, back and back and back. They had no great powers or defenses aside from numbers, and could not gather freely out in the world where it would draw the hunters forth. It was only under the wing of Dracula that they might flourish and feed.

After the soldiers came the merchants and the artisans, bearing silks and tomes and exotic beasts, sketches for paintings and plans for buildings, all hoping that they might gain his eye and barter for this spell or that favor – for any patron could pay them in gold, but for power, for prestige, there were things that only Dracula could supply.

And all the little ticks and leeches of the lower courts would soon be swarming after. The sensible among them would not want to arrive _too_ quickly, lest they appear desperate and put the scent of blood in the air for their rivals; nor would they wish to wait too long without offering a greeting, for fear of offending him.

In truth, he had only ever eaten the one heart – but certainly, none would ever forget it.

“It will be Carmilla,” he told his Forgemasters, quite unprompted, into the silence of the library that had become his new haunt. “She is as arrogant and impulsive as her predecessor.”

Isaac turned his attention from his book. Hector looked up from where he knelt on the carpet, dangling a cord for a half-skinned cat that had somehow found its way back with him.

Such a pleasant, domestic little scene they made.

“Of my court, Carmilla will show herself first, no doubt, and bring some trouble with her.” He propped his head on his hand. “How tiresome.”

“Whatever trouble this Carmilla brings,” Isaac said, “only speak the word, and she will not reach you with it.”

“I should have ordered Cho to attend me,” Dracula mused. “Do you know, she has a whole stable of humans at her keep. She demands the surrounding settlements give them to her as children. Barbaric.”

“I can think of many humans that deserve worse from life than to be kept by a vampire,” Hector said, turning his attention back to his cat.

“I could have demanded one as tribute – though I’d have to furnish new rooms. Adrian was terribly spoiled. He never did learn to share. What do you think, Isaac? A little child from far Nippon, with dark eyes and darker hair?”

Isaac closed his book. “I think, my lord, that you would spoil that one as well,” he said, his inscrutable voice touched with something warm, something at least _like_ fondness and amusement.

Isaac was not wrong. Dracula felt he had done himself a mortal, grievous wound when he turned his family out into the night. He also knew it would not work, this attempt to distract himself, this absurd fancy that if only he could find the right kind of humans, similar _enough_ humans, he might patch over the raw places left behind. He might as well still try. He would have to mend himself somehow. And if the past was the only time he had lived, then he would chase that mirage unto his end.

“Yes, I probably would.”

Much as he predicted, it was not too much longer before one of his attendant soldiers begged permission to enter and speak, flustered and fearful that a lapse in protocol would be paid for from his hide. At least he had had some few moments of peace. Isaac had moved on to a new book. Hector and his new pet had claimed the chair on his other side and were dozing.

“Was there ever a time when I could enjoy being right?” Dracula groused as he stood from his chair. “Yes, yes, I will open the mirror.”

He briefly entertained the notion that he might break the connection just as the nuisance stepped through, and trap her in the endless silvery paths made traversable by a transmission mirror’s enchantments – but alas, he didn’t think he could write that quickly.

He inscribed the last of the coordinates and stepped back – not aside, never aside, but one stride back such that those who begged his charity in these matters must present themselves immediately in a bow under his looming gaze.

Carmilla, as ever, was slow to bend. “My lord,” she drawled, infuriatingly syrupy.

Her only reprieve from his rage was that her traveling companion followed immediately after her. Lenore swept in and dropped herself into a curtsy so low that her skirts billowed around her, her eyes under her veil fixed demurely to the floor.

“My Lord Dracula,” she greeted him, with at least a more convincing veneer of flattery. “You have our deepest gratitude for allowing us this honor, and for sparing us the toil of the long journey to the seat of our people’s power. We are indebted to your wisdom and generosity.”

She dared look up at him with a chill little smile that did a convincing enough job, he supposed, at parodying warmth. Then she flicked her gaze across to Carmilla, and dropped one side of her skirts to take the hand of her petty queen.

Carmilla bowed lower with a face like she’d expected a fresh meal and gotten a solid mouthful of clot.

“I eagerly await the day that Styria joins the rest of us in civilization and I do not have to be inconvenienced with fetching you forth from the hinterlands,” Dracula said, honing the point of his claw. “You have already interrupted my night, do not try me further.”

They jumped aside like startled crows as he stepped forward to close the mirror.

“The guards will see you to suitable accommodations,” he added. Ideally, somewhere with shutters that needed patching.

Incapable of taking a hint – or perhaps just defiantly unwilling – the two followed him all the way back down to the library.

Isaac glanced up from his book when they entered. Hector jumped from his seat, undead cat in his arms.

Dracula looked him over with a critical eye. “Hector, sit down. You are _my_ Forgemaster – you do not stand for representatives of lower society,” he scolded.

Hector lowered himself slowly, sheepishly. Only when he was seated did Dracula resume his own seat and stop looming over him – and so, Dracula had the pleasure of turning just in time to catch Lenore deliberately trodding on Carmilla’s foot before she fixed on a smile and lifted her veil.

“Please, my Lord Dracula,” Lenore said, in her cajolingly cheery way. “It’s our great shame that we have been unable to host you in our far province, and show to you all of the improvements that we’ve lately made. I recognize that we are in your domain now, and all happens at your pleasure – but if you would please grant me leave to plan some little entertainment for you in the coming nights, it would do me the highest of honors.”

“Very well,” Dracula sighed. “If you will leave me in peace for the night, I will let you plan your little amusements.”

“Thank you, my lord,” Lenore said, with a rather smaller curtsy this time. “You do me a great honor.”

Dracula made a noise of vague acknowledgment and reached for the book Isaac had earlier discarded “The guards. Your rooms.”

“Yes, my lord. I wish you an enjoyable evening.”

And at last, they were escorted from the room.

“She seemed… pleasant,” Hector said, though it was truly half a question.

“They are grasping vultures, both of them.” Dracula glanced up from the book – a journal of alchemy he’d brought back from a night spent dining on a reclusive practitioner. “Truly, Hector, I would stick to cats.” 

* * *

“That went well!” Lenore said brightly, laying aside her mantle.

Carmilla stalked the bounds of their adjoined suites, checking for spy-holes and weaknesses. “You stepped on me!”

“I wouldn’t have needed to, if you could at least pretend to respect him. Striga and Morana were right, it would have been a disaster if you came alone.” Idly, she glanced in the mirror at the dressing table and twisted up her hair, mentally trying on a few more elegant styles.

“What are you doing?” Carmilla asked her flatly. She slunk up behind to watch, resting her hands on Lenore’s slim shoulders.

“If I’m going to be distracting our _mighty Lord Dracula_ for you, I ought to look my best.” She held the front of her hair swept away from her face and bit her lip, considering.

“I am sure I don’t want to hear this.”

“You know,” Lenore said slowly, lifting her chin and putting on a winsome little smile. “I’d forgotten quite how _big_ he is.”

Carmilla threw her hands up and spun away with a noise of disgust.

* * *

The Speakers elected to not resume their travels immediately, and Lisa and Adrian came to a tentative agreement that they would not leave yet either – or rather, Lisa decided that she would not leave, and Adrian reluctantly agreed with her.

She didn’t know if she _liked_ these people, but she did know that several had hesitantly come forward with scrapes or sores or coughs, and a few more had not come forward with anything but had the look and the smell – that was certainly new – of malnourishment or anemia about them. They managed well enough on foraged or offered vegetables and grains, but they could certainly use the meat and fish she and Adrian excelled at providing. Well, Adrian excelled. She was… progressing.

She hadn’t yet succeeded in bringing down any large prey on her own – there was one doe in the area, or maybe several, that continuously eluded her – but she would get better. Less clumsy. Some day her body – her legs – would feel entirely her own again, and she would…

She would curl herself in against her husband’s side, under his arm. _‘Hunt with me.’_ She’d pluck at his hair, just to tease him. _‘Let’s chase.’_ And it would be—

Behind her, a twig snapped, and the fat wood pigeon she’d been stalking awoke and took off in a flurry of feathers.

She turned to see Sypha scratching sheepishly at her hair.

“And now neither of us can eat,” Lisa said, only slightly sour.

“I wanted to apologize to you,” Sypha started, slowly and stinking of a lie.

“Oh, did you?”

“No. I wanted to apologize to your son, but every time I approach him, he disappears up a tree.”

“I’m not surprised.” Lisa looked around the copse they were in for a place to sit – there, that stone would do. “He’s always had a difficult time because of his parentage. It was a particularly cruel thing to do to him, to offer your hand in friendship and then snatch it back.”

Sypha lowered herself cross-legged onto the leaf-littered ground. “That’s not what I intended to do.”

“But it is what you did,” Lisa said, looking not down at the girl but up at the stars. It was curious, she could no longer quite recall the blue of the daylit sky. Was it like Speaker robes?

“It is what I did.” Sypha sighed. “Would you please… just tell him I’d like to speak to him?”

“I suppose I can.” Lisa reached to play with her braid out of habit, but of course, it was not there. “I’d love to refuse just because you were so intolerably rude, but considering what I married, I don’t know that I have room to judge.”

“Now _that_ is something I’ll never understand,” Sypha said, flicking at the fallen leaves.

“You might, if you could look beyond, ‘ _but Dracula!’_ The focus of all your tales to terrify children is also a loving husband and a doting father.” Lacking hair to fidget with, Lisa clutched at the soft, worn robes she’d been given to wear.

She missed him so much.

She’d long missed him every day they were apart but since that disastrous night, the feeling seemed to take on a will of its own. Every step away from him felt more and more like her heart had been replaced by a void in her chest. How often had she teased him for being dramatic? She’d been wholly unprepared for the desperation and ferocity, the possessive and consuming nature of a vampire’s love.

“You truly do love him…” Sypha said, slow with wonder. “But he is… a monster. A murderer. And you… you seemed like a good woman. You didn’t want to be… _this_.” She made a vague sort of gesture encompassing all of Lisa.

“A vampire? That’s what you mean, isn’t it?” Lisa asked. Another time, she might have been accusing, but her tone was only tired and dry. “That you think I’m a good person because you think I’d rather be dead than this?”

“No, I—”

“What you are is wrong,” Lisa spat. “And I think Vlad thought the same as you, that I meant to be _good_ and _saintly_ and martyr myself rather than be like him. But I wasn’t afraid to be like my husband, or my son – I was terrified that I wouldn’t be!”

Sypha rocked back and leaned away from her. “I don’t—”

“Vlad and Adrian are both so— _so_ quick and clever, and capable of being so gentle, and I was just— I was scared, but I was so angry and I was so _thirsty_ and I felt that if I drank once, I might never stop.” Her voice wavered unexpectedly, and her eyes stung. “That I would ask for more and more and more, and Vlad wouldn’t stop me because he’d do _anything_ I asked of him, I know he— I couldn’t bear the thought of it!” She choked on a sob that felt like a wild thing clawing its way up her throat. “Of everything that was _me_ , gone, and my love toiling forever for some endless hateful thirst wearing my face.”

A blurry shape came suddenly into Lisa’s view – she reared back and blinked rapidly, trying to make sense of things.

“You’re bleeding!” Sypha was suddenly on her knees before her, with her fist up and her fingers curled as the girl first stretched forward and then jerked back from reaching for her face.

She dabbed at her cheeks and pulled her fingertips away red.

“Oh. I… It’s only tears.” She scrubbed at her face with the sides of her hands, which only made the mess bigger and worse.

“I never thought to see a vampire cry,” Sypha mused. She helped wipe Lisa’s face clean with gentle fingers – they were damp, which seemed… odd, and a bit chilled.

Or, Lisa thought they might be. Everything felt a bit strange and foreign to her. Her mind still expected everything to feel and sound and smell as it did _before_ , and could never quite judge her new impressions of things.

She dropped her hands into her lap and stared down at them.

“They stole my ring.” Her voice was reduced to a cracking whisper. She touched the naked spot on her finger. “I don’t even have that left now.”

“Are you…?” Sypha wiped at her face with the dampened edge of her sleeve.

Distantly, Lisa thought that she might smell water. Perhaps the Speaker had a waterskin? Mostly, she could only smell the salt and iron of her own stinging tears.

“You were very… proud, very dignified, the night you told us your story. This is… are you all right?”

Wherever Sypha had gotten the water from, it was soothingly cool against Lisa’s skin, though she only held the memory of the uncomfortable flush and fever of tears, for vampires didn’t warm up that way.

“I couldn’t— not in front of Adrian,” she struggled to get out with a wavering voice. “What should I have told him? That they broke my fingers ripping off my wedding ring? That priests with knives up their sleeves sliced all my hair off, kicked me in the ribs until I was sick? That they held me down and tore my clothes away, and called me a devil’s whore, said that I—” She choked off her words with a miserable whimper.

She was shaking, trembling in a way that she felt only because she thought that Sypha’s hands were still steady – or maybe they were not. The girl’s breathing wasn’t steady, each exhale tight and shaky and sharply scented with what Lisa thought, but did not know, might be the trace of human misery.

“I want my son to believe that there’s good in people,” Lisa muttered, voice thick and wet. “Even if I— even if I have to lie to make it seem that way. I don’t want him to be— I don’t want him to live in a hateful world, even if I have to.”

Sypha tugged on her hands, and Lisa let herself be pulled to her knees so that they were both crouching in the dirt. The Speaker wrapped her arms around her shoulders and pulled her close – Lisa turned her head to rest her chin and not her cheek upon the girl’s slim shoulder, not trusting herself so close to a living pulse. She, at last, understood Vlad’s bliss at her mortal touch. The warmth of something as simple as living hands stroking her hair was like a balm for aches and weariness that existed in her mind as much as her flesh. She closed her eyes and tried to will her tears to stop – without the trick of controlling her breathing, she wasn’t quite sure how to do this thing.

They sat for a while that way. Sypha rubbed her back and hummed little snippets of something haunting and foreign, a wordless tune that still spoke of a life lived in faraway places, of home as a people and not a place. Lisa rocked slightly in her grasp, listening to the steady drumbeat of her mortal heart.

She was still so thirsty.

She kept her fangs behind her closed lips.

Mostly, she was just hollow inside, and no matter how she glutted herself, it wouldn’t mend that wound.

“Did your husband cry like this?” Sypha asked, soft and almost hypnotic in her melodious accent. “Your Vlad Țepeș? Did he shed tears?”

Lisa choked on a little burst of laughter that the question surprised out of her. It was a good memory she’d brought up – oh, it ached in her hollowed-out heart, but it was good.

“When Adrian was born—” She sniffled a bit, and rubbed at her nose. “It was just the two of us, we daren’t fetch a midwife. He caught our son himself. And then he started crying, and couldn’t stop.” She laughed a bit, sadly, to recall how baffled he’d been. “I don’t know if he was scared, or overjoyed, or both. I just remember him holding our boy in his big hands, and Adrian would yawn, or wave one of his little fists, and it would set him off all over again. He was enthralled from the very start.”

The memory ached, but it was a good one. The dull glow of it suffused her with something like remembered warmth.

“A loving husband,” Sypha said, mostly to herself, in an uncertain drawl. “A doting father. A man that cried at the birth of his son.”

“And an ass,” Lisa admitted thickly. “An ass and an idiot besides. But he is not a simple monster – I refuse to let that be the truth. Because if it is…” She sat reluctantly back on her heels. “Then what hope is there for me?”

“If he— would you—” Sypha started to ask.

She was interrupted by a blur of red and a flash of silver, which she met decisively, with blazing eyes and a spark of fire between her fingertips.

Adrian didn’t rear back under the force of her quick response, but he didn’t stand a chance, regardless.

His mother was there.

“Adrian!” Lisa scolded.

He wilted under the heat of her disapproval, shoulders slumping, and gestured his blade back into its sheath. “I smelled blood,” he offered in contrition. “You’re a magician,” he added to Sypha, much less timidly.

“I know we’ve discussed the benefits of a good cry,” Lisa said, as she used the heels of her palms to rub away any further traces of her tears. “There’s nothing to be accusing about, here.”

“I’m sorry!” Sypha half-barked the words, all in a rush. She curled her fingers into a fist and extinguished her little wisp of flame. “For hiding things, and being rude. I didn’t understand, and I wasn’t trying very hard. I should have known better.”

“You’re _sorry_ ,” Adrian said flatly.

“I’m a magician,” Sypha said, though she looked to Lisa and not to him. “I’d never really thought… What happened – that could have been me, though I would have been able to fight back, to escape. But… only if I put aside the ways of my people. And I realized, I do not want to die so my goodness can be praised over my ashes. So maybe I…”

She was very young, this stubborn, mouthy Speaker girl – certainly younger than Lisa had been, when she struck out in search of a castle built of rumors. Her first thoughts were not of cruelty and disaster, and if the world was good she might stay that way. But the world was not good yet. Lisa smoothed a hand over her hair as she might do to her son, a simple, soothing gesture.

Adrian stared down at them for a stretch with a face pinched tight by anger before he finally nodded, sharp and stiff.

Lisa attempted to stand and go to him, but her vision wavered as she stood and she swayed on her feet. He rushed forward to catch her, and she patted at his cheek in gratitude.

“I think he was right,” Adrian said gravely. “I fear you truly do need human blood, or— please, you mustn’t—”

“Adrian,” Lisa sighed, no longer quite up to the effort of scolding him or disagreeing. The dam that burst within her might have held back her fears, but she felt it had held in her strength as well. “You know that I…”

“You will die!” There was panic in his bright gold eyes. Panic and hurt.

“I won’t die,” Lisa insisted, though she leaned on him heavily and trembled in his arms. “I won’t. But I will not _kill_ either. Not… not good people. Not these people…”

“Maybe…” Adrian said slowly, drawing out the sounds as he drew out the thought. “The keep that Father was helping me build, in Greșit.”

“In _Greșit_?” Sypha asked sharply.

Adrian ignored her. “There is blood there – _human_ blood, from his stores. Perhaps, if you laid down to heal there…”

“For how long?” Lisa asked.

“I don’t… I don’t know. I hoped that just drinking anything might— but you’re still weak. If anything can heal you… it’s _his_ work under the city, his science.”

“His science, his magic.” Lisa breathed a sad little laugh. “But Vlad made a long study of the means to mend a vampire’s ills. I would rather have him… but if not him, then, I suppose, Greșit…”

“Laid down to rest. In Greșit. You’re quite sure?” Sypha asked again, with a peculiar edge of urgency.

“If you have some sort of objection,” Adrian began, sour.

Sypha shook her head. “No, I—” She paused and clenched her teeth, then sighed through a frown as puzzled as it was angry. “Lady Țepeș, if Dra— if your husband were to do something… terrible. Something terrible. Would you stop him?”

“ _Were_ to do something terrible?” Lisa shook her head. “I only hope he’s so furious at me that he hasn’t gathered himself up to start _yet_. You treat him as a myth but forget he holds himself a king – and a king will not suffer an insult. But if he turned to the blameless, the innocent… No. No, I wouldn’t let him do that.”

“You’d stop him?” Sypha’s gaze was searching.

“I’d stay his hand,” Lisa said, simultaneously certain and yet very much not so. Why these questions? “If that’s what you’re asking. There are paths to my husband’s heart that do not need to be sought with a stake.”

“Why are you asking this?” Adrian demanded, tense.

“It’s what I should have asked from the start,” Sypha said. “But I didn’t think— I’m sorry, again, for being so rude. It isn’t our way.”

“Hmm.” Adrian eyed her for a moment more, before redirecting his attention. “What do you think, Mother?”

“Would you speak to him, while I sleep? Would you ask him to come to me?”

Adrian looked away. “I don’t—”

“Adrian, _please_.” Lisa pulled at the front of his coat with clenched fists. “We need to speak. I need to apologize—”

“ _You_ need to apologize?!”

“I need to apologize, for implying such cruel things and pushing him to such desperation. And then—”

“ _You_ need to apologize. This is madness.”

“ _And then_ , I’ll have your idiot father groveling on his hands and knees for being such a magnificent _ass_ about it all. You may feel however you feel about things, for as long as it lasts. But I want to speak with him. I’ll… I’ll never recover without a chance to tend that wound, too.”

Hesitantly, Adrian covered her hands with his own. “And if I say yes?”

“Then I’ll go to Greșit. I’ll take what’s stored there, even if it— it’s not what I would have preferred. Just promise me that you’ll tell him I need him, whatever else you say.”

Sypha approached them slowly, and reached up to gingerly rest a hand on Lisa’s shoulder. “Then we should get cleaned up,” she said, gesturing to the stains on both their clothing. “And then, we should speak to my grandfather – about Greșit.”

* * *

As sunrise was approaching, a lithe, quick little creature that used to be a doe entered the great halls of Dracula’s castle and sought out its master. In its mouth, it held a dry leaf fallen from a tree, spattered with a fluid that was not quite blood. No guards hindered it. All stepped aside after one glance at the unearthly blue of its eyes.

It nosed open a door that had the scent of its maker’s touch upon it, and recently, and found him, and his companion, and the master as well. It stepped forward, hooves clicking on the stone and then padding across the carpet, and bowed its head to deliver its message into the master’s waiting palm.

Dracula stroked his thumb over the rusty marks painted across the leaf’s surface. “Oh, Lisa.”

Isaac leaned in. “Blood? Is she hurt? Is there danger?”

But a vampire was a night creature, too, and had senses that perceived beyond the scope of a human’s knowledge.

“No,” Dracula said, roughly. “No, not quite.”

A fresh drop of red splashed atop the ones already dried.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first half of this was incredibly fun to write. The second half was... well, it was rough.


	9. Chapter 9

The Speakers all looked at her with a different sort of weight, when they mentioned traveling to Greșit – or rather, Adrian, ignoring a heated stare from Sypha, thanked them for their ‘hospitality’ and announced that the two of them would be taking their leave, after which Sypha exclaimed that they were all going to Greșit.

Lisa didn’t know if she liked it. There was an air of expectation to the way she was addressed now. It made her skin prickle, and it gave Adrian a pinched, sour look every time it happened.

But it hardly mattered how she felt because it seemed they were all going to Greșit unless she allowed Adrian to carry her the entire way. She simply lacked the strength to walk for the lengths needed to make good time. She’d spent too much of it hunting prey too small and too… well. There was no avoiding what diet she required, not anymore.

All around her was the clamor of mortal life, as the Speakers worked to make a new camp for the evening. Even with the eyes of two vampires to aid them, it was perilous for humans to travel through the night. She heard them laugh and chatter with one another. She heard them breathe. She heard their hearts.

She heard their hearts and she was not willing, but she was thirsty.

At least, she thought as she peered at the sunset from under the cover of the wagon and many borrowed blankets – at least she was not weakened in all ways. She held her hand out, letting the last of the sun’s rays scour across her skin.

It stung like a vicious sunburn, but not much worse.

Her trust in everything had been so battered, beaten to nothing, when she first awoke, but she wished she had had more trust to put in her love.

Would he have saved a mindless beast in her shape? Would he have bent to its every demand as it brought forth the worst and cruelest in him?

Yes.

For he was old and ageless, and she had chosen _then_ to send him out in the world because she saw how he chafed at the thought she was _not_. His fussing and fretting infuriated her. A trip to find wonders and forget his grief. What a fool she had been! She never did learn of the precise circumstances that bound him to his second life, but he’d well implied they’d been of grief, and loss, and rage. Grief was written into his very bones. Endless. As long as he was, so it would be, too.

What, then, had been written into hers?

Strength, she thought, turning her palm up to the fading light. All of his power and all of his will, yoked to the cause of her survival.

And… mercy, vengeance, bound together inextricably. _Judgment._ She cringed at the thought of putting her teeth to the ignorant, the innocent. She could not bite these Speakers, no matter how she thirsted. Yet she thought of the brute in the cassock that had cracked her ribs and spat in her face as he bound her to the stake, and she was consumed with the need to bite and rend and feast.

Could she do it?

Before she found Vlad, she’d had to bribe judges and executioners to look the other way when a criminal was to be disposed of, that she might study the secrets of the body, under candlelight and under a knife.

She thought she might bite out that priest’s rotten heart.

She peered out at the sunset, the pain of it piercing but manageable.

_Most_ vampires could not withstand a meeting with the sun, or consecrated objects, or silver – but her husband was not _any_ vampire. True, their wedding rings had been made of bright and highly polished pewter, and she had seen him annoyed and inconvenienced by the efforts of hunters, if not dangerously injured, but she knew that the mere touch of the morning or evening sun would not end him. She understood just enough about the culture of vampires to know that Vlad had put much more into binding her to this altered life than he’d strictly needed to. How strong she was, how successful he’d been, that was not yet clear and her hunger didn’t help with answers – but he had _not_ made a thrall of her. The magic he worked to hold her in the world, he’d worked it thoroughly and drawn deep from the vast well of his power to fix her into existence.

_My queen_ , he used to tease her.

A companion, an equal, to stand at the side of Dracula.

_‘Lady Țepeș, if your husband were to do something terrible, would you stop him?’_

She was no longer mortal… but she was herself, if altered. A will to teach, a healing hand, a wish to see a better world; all of these things were true of her still.

“Adrian,” she called, barely above a whisper.

He was quick to come to her, hopping up the rear of the wagon on sure, light feet.

“Are you well?” he asked. He chose his seat carefully and positioned himself between her and the last slivers of the sun. “Do you need to drink?”

She peered at him from under the shadows of her borrowed hood – humble clothes, nomad’s clothes. “Leave tonight. Go to your father as quickly as you can,” she bade him, with the will of a queen. “And demand that he come to me.”

Adrian sat still as stone for several moments. “And leave you alone? He’s not going to accept demands from a half-breed he’s disavowed.”

“My darling.” Lisa reached for her son’s hands. “I know that I’m asking too much of you – but please. I’m worried about what he might decide to do.”

“Because he’s a monster,”

“Because he’s alone, too.”

“Then he should have thought of that before he turned us out with nothing!” Adrian’s voice cracked and he pulled away from her, with clenched fists and furrowed brows.

Lisa sighed. “You’ve never seen him snap his jaws and snarl in a temper before, and he was right – you are a sensitive young man. I can’t imagine where you got that from.”

Adrian scowled, so she reached for his hands again.

“It’s not an insult, darling. There’s no shame in having a soft heart. It’s only that your father and I, we tend more to a hard head.”

“That’s…”

He looked away again, so Lisa pulled on his hands more forcefully. When he still wouldn’t look, she took him by the chin.

“Adrian, please. I’m worried about what he may do if he believes he won’t see us again. I can’t allow suffering where I could prevent it. Go before we get any further. Just tell him I want to see him, and then… and then you can do whatever you like.”

“I’ll go,” Adrian said sharply, jerking his face from her grasp. He rose as best he could, half-stooped under the cover of the wagon. “I’ll tell him – if he’ll see me. Perhaps I won’t come back.”

She’d pushed him too far. There he was, snapping his jaws and snarling.

“That’s all right,” she whispered. “I know I’m asking too much of you – but who else am I to ask?” She stood as well. The low canvas ceiling took away Adrian’s slight advantage in height, making it simple for her to lean in and press a kiss to his cheek. “I hope that one day, you’ll be able to forgive us for failing you so badly. I’ll be waiting in Greșit – for both of you.”

* * *

Lord though he was, it had been many long years since Dracula shut himself away – many long years since he sat the throne. Yet, that was what he did that night, ever-so-slightly slouched in a way that made him seem both bored and arrogant.

Lenore half-hid herself behind the doors and peered at him through the gloom of the long hall. It was the first chance she’d have to catch him alone, without his human attendants to hand – yet, there was an air of foreboding that gave her pause. He looked idle, but his eyes burned with some carefully banked fury. He was… watchful.

He was waiting.

She could wait, too.

There was a great scuffle from behind her – the bestial calls and hisses of night creatures, and the sharp desperation of human panic. She turned and saw the Forgemasters and their creations, and one battered, stinking human dragged between them, his eyes wide and rolling with fear and madness as he tried to pull his shoulders from the joint to escape his captors’ grasp.

One of the Forgemasters – the one with the pale hair, now what was he called? Hector? Hector released the prisoner and stepped aside, taking up a position behind the other door across from her.

He glanced her way with an uncertain little frown. “You may want to leave if you don’t want to see this,” he muttered.

“See what?” She looked back down the long hall, where Dracula had straightened in his seat with anticipation.

“I can’t blame him,” Hector said, instead of answering her directly. “It’s in the nature of a predator to take joy in playing with its prey. It’s simply what he was meant to do. But I admit, he… excels at it maybe too much for my comfort.”

The other Forgemaster ascended the stairs before the throne, dragging the panicked human along, and threw him to the ground before Dracula’s polished boots. He planted a foot on the wretched thing’s back before it could scrabble away.

“What have you brought me, Isaac?” Dracula near-purred, caressing each sound with both malice and affection.

Lenore could half-imagine Carmilla sneering about lazy old beasts that did not hunt for themselves, but she dismissed the fancy as she stared, transfixed. This was not lassitude. This was a king, demanding tribute.

Isaac ground his boot into the unlucky bastard’s spine. “He tried to take her down, my lord.”

Dracula leaned forward in his seat, all the way until he could reach down to cup the human’s jaw in his great clawed hand, dwarfing it utterly. “You tried to take her down?” he asked, mouth turned into a grin that was as comely as it was mocking. “Have you not yet learned?”

“She were a witch!” the human shouted in a voice made raspy by rough handling and fear. “Lisa Țepeș were a witch!”

Țepeș – the woman. The human that went unaccounted for. Lenore leaned further around the door. Hector caught her eye and shook his head, but she didn’t heed him. She took one careful step into the hall.

Dracula sat back and looked down his nose at the battered human, both indulgent and disdainful. He waved a hand to Isaac, and the Forgemaster stepped back.

The human, doomed thing, tried and failed to stand on clearly mangled legs. “She went and found the devil and she laid with him for his secrets. Everyone in the village knew it! She left and came back with things too fine for a butcher’s whelp, and a head full of ungodly ideas. She were a witch, and a witch has to die!”

Dracula rested his elbow on the arm of his throne, and his chin on his hand, and the glint of his eye and the curve of his lip, the flash of his fang, sent a prickle of foreboding down Lenore’s spine.

“This is unfortunate,” Dracula said. “—for you. It would seem that, by your dubious logic, Lisa Țepeș was, indeed, a witch – for the devil courted her with riches and knowledge, and she pleased him greatly by becoming his bride.”

“We were right!” The stench of the human’s fear increased ten-fold. “A witch has to die, and—” he fumbled for something in his clothing “—and a demon does too! You—!”

Dracula surged from his seat, and splinters of something wooden clattered to the ground, slapped from the human’s hand. He took the creature by the neck and held him aloft over the edge of the dais.

“You poor, stupid thing,” he crooned to the gurgling human. “She wanted so much to help you, to save you, to ease your mortal burden. Your god won’t do that – no, your earthly suffering only ripens the soul for the harvest. Here you are, caught in the claws of evil itself, and all your symbols and superstitions will do nothing to save you.”

The human kicked and whimpered.

Dracula pulled him in close and ran claws over his head in a mockery of a soothing. “But the wicked – oh. I will empty hell and rain blood upon the earth for the crimes you have committed. That which is beloved of the devil is guarded well, and jealously, and you will pay for what you’ve done to her.”

He loomed forward, and the human’s desperate shriek was quickly cut off by a gurgle and a spray of bright red blood. Little spatters hit the floor, the throne, his face.

A bite, to an artery.

He threw his head back, lips parted, fangs smeared red, and staggered back to his seat. As he collapsed upon the throne, he bent his head and bit again. The human twitched weakly in his grasp.

Lenore looked to Hector – he stood with his back to the door, his eyes fixed firmly upon the distance beyond the far wall. _‘...The nature of a predator to take joy in playing with its prey.’_

She turned to Dracula just in time to see him draw back and then bite again. He couldn’t be getting much that way – with severed arteries, the heartbeat would be feeble. Hardly worth a second bite, let alone a third.

A sharp wet snap echoed against the walls – the cartilage of the windpipe, crushed between his jaws.

He released that bite and dragged his knuckles through the blood smeared across his cheek in a sort of indolent ecstasy. The human’s corpse sagged limply across his lap.

He plunged his claws in under the thing’s ribs – suddenly, violently – and drew his blood-soaked fist out slowly, clutched around its heart.

The Forgemaster, Isaac – the very human, very mortal Forgemaster – sank to his knees beside the throne and leaned himself upon its arm. He gazed up at Dracula, and Lenore was shocked to realize that the rhythm of his racing heart was not of terror, but of exhilaration.

Dracula rested his bloodied hand across his Forgemaster’s – his _favorite’s_ , it was now so clear to see – shoulder, and kicked the corpse off the dais with an idle twitch of his boot. It landed in a heap with a hollow, meaty thud.

“Dispose of it, Hector,” he called, its heart still clutched in his hand.

About this, at least, Hector did not seem to be squeamish.

With the… the play… all done, he strode into the hall and hefted the limp thing onto his broad shoulder. “Shall I send it back with the others?” he grunted, only partially winded by its dead weight.

“Yes,” Dracula breathed, idly licking at the blood on his hand. “Until they all learn – never again, Hector. I won’t have it happen ever again.”

“Yes.” Hector sketched a very abbreviated bow under his burden.

His eyes flicked to her as he passed, full of something like a warning. But Lenore was unable to tear herself away. It had been long decades since any had witnessed Dracula at the hunt, yet still, he was regarded as the pinnacle of their kind. The most powerful, the most terrible. A creature of nightmares and shadows.

She had to see. She had to know.

“How do you feel, my lord?” Isaac asked. “Are you sated? Is it good?”

Dracula leaned back into his seat and held up the heart cradled in his palm. He tore it open with his teeth and dragged his tongue along the chambers. “I need more, Isaac. I need—” he crushed the organ in his fist and tossed it carelessly aside. “I need more. It’s never enough.”

“Where shall we go?” Isaac asked, his calm voice pitched to a soothing caress. “Where shall Dracula feast next?”

And Dracula leaned on the same arm of the throne, casting a deep shadow over his mortal favorite. “He had a cross in his jacket, that one. I think… I think it’s time we visit the church.”

“Yes,” Isaac answered with the barest hint of a cruel little grin. “Let them see what their evil has done.”

As quietly as she could, Lenore backed herself from the room.

She’d been confident when they’d left Styria. Witty conversation, a meal or two. Perhaps a hunt. To charm and distract was where she excelled, and to consider charming Dracula was no great hardship. Carmilla had her own ideas about how to raise their council in esteem and power – schemes and grand plans, big ideas and bold actions. Lenore – she was a diplomat. A politically advantageous marriage was as valid a strategy as any, from her position, and less risky than most. She had never considered her heart when weighing the matter. She had never needed to, until now.

Now she considered that she did not want it bitten open and discarded on the throne room’s floor.

* * *

A dhampir was a hardy creature, as at ease under the sun as under the moon. The journey that had taken so long with his mother took significantly less as Adrian ran it, pausing only as his body demanded rest and not for the dictates of either night or day. He shifted shapes as he went, sometimes on two feet on lonely stretches of path, sometimes on four through shaded woods, sometimes on wings over briars and brambles, and sometimes in no shape at all. Though he hated himself for it, it felt good to be alone with his thoughts and out from under the pall of his mother’s intertwined hope and grief.

He half-hoped the castle would be long gone from its last position. He didn’t want to run messages between the ruins of his family. He didn’t want to face his father again and find only a stranger’s lack of regard. He didn’t want to watch his mother fade away under the burden of her false belief in a monster’s kind heart.

…He didn’t want to be wrong and watch them reconcile.

He didn’t want to realize that the only one easy to discard was him, eternally and inconveniently in-between.

He hated it less than he’d thought he would, life on the roads. Even bossy, graceless Sypha hadn’t disliked him from the start – only after it was revealed just what monster his progenitor was.

Let this be the end of this disaster. His mother couldn’t be content to have him. She was consumed with longing for the treacherous beast she’d left behind, and so she begged him to return to the spot where his world was shattered. Very well. His father could not bear an insult spoken in delirium. He would rather abandon them both to chance than swallow his pride and struggle like the mortal and helpless. Fine. They could have each other, and he wished them well of it.

He was going to deliver this message and then disappear out into the wilds to be no one and nothing, unburdened by the demands of the family that failed his heart too many times come much too quickly. Maybe he would stalk the humans his mother longed to protect, for nothing more than sport because they had never cared for him. Maybe he would be a hunter and leave his father’s people in ashes, again and again, because they had never respected him.

He lept over a fallen tree on four paws and landed on two feet. There was the castle, walls burning red like blood in the fading evening sun. He…

No.

He stood there so long that the sun set. The stars began to glimmer overhead. And a strange vampire in a black cloak slipped out a side passage and down from the ramparts to meet him. Not his father. Not one of his soldiers. He squared his shoulders and stood his ground.

“Aren’t you bold,” the vampire, a woman, greeted him as she approached. “To stare so long at Dracula’s castle and not present yourself to the lord. Hmm, but then – I watched you out here, standing in the sunset. And yet, you’re no human. No, you’re quite a different breed entirely, aren’t you?”

“What of it?” he asked, resting his hand upon his sword.

“Please!” She laughed, a sound that was stopped from being pleasant only by some obscure sense that something was _off_ , that it ought not to be.

He tightened his grip upon the hilt.

“I am Carmilla, of Styria,” she said with a small bow. “And unless I’m much mistaken, _you_ … are the elusive young prince.”

Styria – where he’d thought to flee to and find his mother shelter, and here their queen was attending his faithless father. There was a plan gone sour.

“Did my father send you out to meet me?”

She laughed again and circled him in a way that had his hackles up – like a predator sizing up prey. But she would be very, very disappointed if she believed that he was a soft and easy kill.

He’d return to her to the castle in pieces.

“Your father? He’s made no mention of you, in fact—’

The words pierced like a lance, though he didn’t even know why he was surprised.

“—No, the mad old man has found himself a new pair of mortal pets to dote on. Forgemasters. A bit more _sturdy_ , I suppose. A bit less defenseless and burdensome.”

He whipped his sword free of its scabbard. “Watch yourself,” he growled.

Carmilla skipped back, light on her feet. “Oh, dear, have I struck a nerve? Well, it’s not what _I_ think of you. I certainly didn’t come all the way east to this little hellhole of hunters and pigshit to watch a deranged, antique tyrant persecute some nothing little village for breaking his toys. No, I came to Wallachia because it presented a real opportunity for once.” She held her hand out to him, palm up, red-painted claws glossy under the moonlight. “I came following the rumors of _you_.”

Of… him?

He lowered the point of his sword, just a little, and tilted his head to look at her askance. “And here I am…” he finally said.

She spread her arms wide so that her cloak slid back from her shoulders. “Here you are. Will you introduce yourself, my mystery prince? As your _dear father_ never extended us the courtesy.”

“Alucard, the people of Wallachia call me.”

He said it without thought or decision, and yet… it felt right. No vampire had ever respected half-breed Adrian Țepeș, but they were certainly all wary of Dracula. His mother had hated that her people regarded him merely as the inverse of his father – shining, golden and lovely, a danger that came instead with soft hands and soft words in the bright of the day – until they branded him as such, a reputation he could never escape. But she had so long known the whispers of Dracula – long before she knew the monster behind the name – that she had never considered that ‘Dracula’ was a name bestowed by the people of Wallachia as well. A creature from stories was ever defined by the people that told them.

Yes, it felt right to face down this sharp-fanged huntress and draw his father’s reputation around him like a mantle. He would never escape his sire’s curse, so let him embrace it. Let those who addressed him never forget the great beast from whom he came.

Let his father never forget the sun-lit reflection that he’d so easily cast aside.

“Alucard,” Carmilla purred. She bowed again, deeper this time, though she did not lower her eyes. “It’s a pleasure, my young prince.”

“And what business would the queen of Styria have with me?”

Carmilla glanced back at the castle and held a single finger up to her painted lips. “Let’s walk, hmm? We can speak more freely away from the castle’s prying eyes.”

Unsure that it was the right thing to do, he returned his sword to its sheath. “There’s a pond,” he said lowly, “some ways into the woods. Father never went there.”

“Excellent!” She unclasped her cloak and threw it over his shoulders as she passed. Again, she glanced at him and held a finger to her lips. “A prince who takes a real interest in his domain – I was right to come looking for you. Dracula has no interest in the West, and besides that, I think he’s quite lost the plot. But you! You’re the kind of ally that could help lift Styria into an entirely new age.”

Alucard watched her walk ahead of him, the train of her gown sweeping over the leaf litter of the forest floor. She carried herself weightlessly on her impractical shoes, the points barely sinking into the earth.

“If you hope to gain land or influence by flattering me,” he said, “you should know that I have neither.”

Carmilla glanced back over her shoulder. “Oh, no,” she said breezily. “I don’t care all that much for Dracula’s court or his kingdom. I’m tired of bending the knee and living out the whims of a selfish man.”

They had that in common, at the least.

“Then what is your interest in me? What do you hope to gain?”

“Do you think everyone is out to use you? That must be exhausting. No, I sought you out for an inheritance much more difficult to take away. A dhampir born from the blood of Dracula!”

“Choose your next words carefully, Carmilla, queen of Styria,” Alucard warned.

“Carefully? Nothing I have to say is an insult to you, my prince. Why, it’s no wonder he kept you away from his court. Those clinging to the old ways are content to follow a tired shadow, I suppose. But some of us – we are ready for a change.”

“What, precisely, are you implying?”

Carmilla turned ‘round to face him. Her eyes glittered even under the shadows of the trees. “You know what I’m implying.”

“I would like you to stop _implying_ it,” Alucard said, his hand rested on the hilt of his sword.

“Idiots look down on dhampirs because they’re mostly born from maggots like Godbrand, who just can’t think with anything but their fucking fangs and their fucking cocks – and that’s not much of a pedigree to speak of. But that’s short-sighted. You day-walkers lack many of the weaknesses a turned vampire has to bear – and Dracula has already been the ruin of whole lineages of hunters without that little advantage. No one _loves_ him. No one _respects_ him. He has us all under his boot because we fear him, and we fear the hunters, and he kills the hunters that we fear.”

“…I’m listening.”

Carmilla grinned, sharp-toothed and thirsty. “ _You_ could take the hunters. Why, with a little support, I’m sure you could even take him.”

He studied her with a quirk of his brow. “Support from Styria?”

“My prince!” Carmilla cried, hand to her chest in a pantomime of scandal while her lip pulled back to bare her fangs. “That would be treason. But support from _allies_ , yes. If you care to make them. There are whispers, you know. Factions that wish to live without the long shadow of Dracula weighing on their minds.”

He thought of his mother, obsessed with appeasing the creature that discarded them without a thought. She claimed it was for love, but he couldn’t reconcile love with the hurt that had been done to them. Not when there was no hand outstretched in forgiveness. Not when there were claims they’d simply been _replaced_.

Not with the implication that their little family had been nothing more than the keeping of _pets_.

“And those whispers are why you sought me?”

Carmilla gestured him closer until he leaned in. She straightened the cloak she’d thrown over his shoulders – black edged in white, not his father’s colors.

“Who else is there?” she asked, her voice lowered to the level of two intimates sharing a precious secret. “Who better to free us from a tyrannical shadow than a prince who walks in the light?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Which scene was easiest to write? Was it the big old scary monster man being a big old scary monster? Yes. Let's not look too closely into that, please. If you read the dialogue between Dracula and Isaac and thought, 'wow, that seems... charged,' then I refer you to the long history of royal favorites that shared shockingly intimate but supposedly platonic relationships with their respective rulers and say, yes, I know. I am not unaware of the thing I have done.
> 
> Now also seems like a good time to remind everyone of the tags -- I didn't promise to fix _anything._
> 
> Thank you again to everyone that's been reading so far, both those that have commented and those that have not. But if you have anything to say, please, don't be shy! Even if it's only to keysmash and flail over the terrible thing I've done to your fave, I love hearing from each and every one of you. Knowing that you're waiting on me gives me the strength to muscle through those things that are so difficult to get down correctly. Like honest introspection. And feelings. Cheers until next time.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This and the next chapter were meant to be one chapter, but eventually, it became clear that no amount of wishful editing was going to make it that way. Apologies for the delay.

With a bit more care than she’d approached the matter before, Lenore pushed ahead at her task of drawing Dracula’s eye away from Carmilla – though she wondered if she might not have a more difficult time drawing his attention _to_ her.

Dracula did not care for the vampires that flocked around him. From the lowest of the burrow-dwellers wearing his colors to Carmilla herself, he regarded them all with impatience and disdain. But he must care for _something!_ He had to! Every creature had its preferences in how it spent its time, what it surrounded itself with. She only had to tease the information free and apply it. Fortunately, she’d excelled at that in her first life and in this one. Had she not been a lady at the court of the duke before handsome, gallant Striga lured her away to their sisterhood? My, but she did like them tall.

The more pressing question, though, was what Dracula liked. There was a kitchen, and some servants that knew enough to staff it respectably, but she never saw him partake of food apart from blood. There was also a wine cellar, and based on the response she got from the servants, he did partake – but she had her doubts about plying him with alcohol. He did like his clothing, that was easy enough to deduce. He was always dressed well, in fine fabrics of the richest black and brightest red, and well washed and groomed also. He enjoyed the hunt – in fact, he was so consumed with ill-aimed rage that the hunt was all he could reliably focus on… apart from his humans. He doted on those humans.

It was a start. She found a merchant of silks and velvets, and a seamstress, and paid a couple of her jewels for a new hunting habit in a more modest shade of black, trimmed with the white of Styria, though she topped it a sash of rich red. An overture at adopting his colors was safe enough, and if he took offense, easily aborted by removing the sash.

She just needed to fine-tune her approach. There was one last ingredient that remained a mystery, that critical spice to bring the whole dish together. Find that, and she would find her opening – and she’d better find it quickly. If Carmilla’s plan didn’t go perfectly, Lenore was beginning to suspect that it would end in disaster, with no gradation in between. Dracula was ill-tempered and eager for an excuse to lash out at anything that displeased him. The whispered myths of him persisted – that he’d not been turned by the usual means, that he came into eternity with no bonds or allegiances, no vampiric bloodline to instill in him their culture or mores. All vampires ripped through prey with abandon – but Lenore was uncomfortably aware that he’d shown no misgivings about putting his teeth to _anything_ he regarded as below him, others of their kind included.

Whatever she did, she’d best do it both well and quickly. Carmilla must have found the scent of her quarry because she’d crept off and not yet returned, and Lenore did not want to discover the number of ways this scheme would offend Dracula. No, if it didn’t go perfectly and leave him in ashes, then she’d better have a way to blunt his rage or it would be all of them on pikes instead. And, well… they were all her sisters, none more precious than the others. If saving Striga and Morana meant letting Carmilla burn… Best hope it didn’t come to that.

She searched up and down the corridors of the castle for that final clue – and found it in the one place she’d never have dared to look.

Dracula stood on the threshold of a door she’d not yet seen opened on this visit – the one to his study. He stared, droop-shouldered and longing, and muttered to himself in some old dialect of the _langues d'oïl_ that died well before she had.

Slowly, carefully, she stepped to stand at his side. The doorway was narrow enough, or he was large enough, that her skirts fell against his leg. She followed his gaze to a portrait of a woman dressed in a gown of vibrant purple silk trimmed in lace and seed pearls. There was something heated and coy in her eyes and her hair, artfully tousled to just the right side of impropriety, shone bright like gold. The lilies in her arms seemed a wicked little jest – the Christians may have associated them with their Blessed Virgin, but hadn’t the Greeks believed they spilled from the breast of vengeful Hera, wife above all wives and queen above all queens?

She had no doubt – this was the woman he pined after. This was the mysterious Lisa Țepeș.

This was the key she sought.

* * *

Lisa turned at Sypha’s approach – or rather, at the scent she carried with her. With her hand cupped under it to catch any spills, the Speaker bore to her a spoonful of blood. _Human_ blood. She could smell the difference, rich and precious.

“Arn sliced himself while cooking,” Sypha explained as she held out her burden – her offering? “And he said that as it was already spilled, it would be foolish to let it be wasted.”

“I— I couldn’t possibly…”

Sypha sighed. “You’d better do, or you’ll break his heart.”

“But it’s barely a mouthful,” Lisa said. She shifted on her seat at the backboard of a wagon and rearranged her borrowed clothes fussily. She didn’t want to turn too far, not with the fire at her back and Adrian sent away. “It may be spilled already, but he can’t think it _that_ much a waste, surely!”

“No.” Sypha tsked and shook her head. “I don’t understand either of you. Gripped by madness. There’s no other explanation.”

“I…?”

“You see—” And here Sypha leaned in, conspiratorial, and brought the blood with her. “—Arn has decided that you are both very learned _and_ very lovely in the blue of a Speaker’s robes. And he indulges a daydream that he might keep you that way.”

Lisa blinked, though her eyes required the relief much less often than they used to. And then she blinked again for good measure. While she was struck dumb, Sypha took her hand and curled her fingers around the spoon’s handle.

“That’s— He’s no older than my son! And I’m a happily married woman, besides.”

Sypha cocked a brow at her. “To Dracula.”

_‘To Vlad Țepeș,’_ Lisa wanted to protest, but…

She stared into the little pool of blood held in the bowl of the spoon. Ripples played across it with the tremors in her hand.

“To Dracula,” she agreed – for he had never separated the myth from the man when naming himself, and at the start, she hadn’t either. Had she truly gotten so protective of him, that at every slight she needed to argue his worth? He did _not_ need her to defend him.

Sypha shook her head and looked up to the stars. “Madness. Utterly impossible.”

Lisa held up her spoon, with its meager little drip of blood, and tipped it side to side to see the shine on its dark surface. “Love can be a kind of madness, I suppose. But…”

“But?”

She closed her eyes and brought her first willing taste of human blood to her lips, and there she paused – for what? It had been a very long time indeed since she was last made to pray over a meal. Yet it felt appropriate to offer some gratitude – to Speakers, perhaps. To Arn.

She half-expected to retch as it spilled over her tongue – but no. It was salty and rich and… tart? A few drops of soured wine had been tipped into it, perhaps. Pleasant, in the way a fat little capon was pleasant. Filling. An utterly unremarkable experience – and for that, it was transformational. She licked the spoon clean.

“But I have never before shied away from doing an impossible thing.”

* * *

“We all realized the Lady was missing, though none have been brave enough to mention it,” Lenore said, careful to pitch her voice soothingly. “Is this her? She’s very beautiful.”

Dracula’s eyes turned down to her slowly, an annoyed gaze just from the corners. He was otherwise very, very still. “Are you here to test my patience, Lenore?”

She pulled the hem of her skirt in and took a step back, bowing her head as she went. “I’m here to serve you, my lord.”

“And how are you doing that?”

“Others will come soon enough. Someone is bound to ask – Godbrand, certainly, as crassly as he does anything. That’s why I insisted we come so quickly, so that I might serve you as I serve Styria and keep these troubles far from your mind.”

“Ah, so you’ve come to test my patience and call it helping.” He turned back to the painting and his shoulders drooped once more. “And to win some prize for Styria, no doubt.”

“Well, yes. That’s my duty to Styria. But… if it helps you, and it helps me… As a diplomat, Lord Dracula, I fail to see the problem. I serve Styria, and Styria serves you. Therefore, I serve you. Let me, please.” She took a half-step closer to him to test her bounds. “Recount what happened once, to me, and I will ensure none bother you to sully her memory.”

“Her memory?” Dracula asked, half a whisper. “No, she lives.”

“Ah— forgive me, I’d overheard—”

He turned away from the painting and from the room, one eye squeezed close in a grimace of pain.

Lenore rushed back a full step to get out from under the looming presence of him.

“The humans tried to burn her,” he said, voice low and rough. He stared at the walls – at nothing. “Tried. I found her. I— turned her. She didn’t take to the change. I… let her go.”

“Let her _go_?”

Dracula’s eyes flicked to her, bright as fire and sharp as steel. She hurriedly bowed her head.

“Forgive me, my lord,” she said in a rush. “I only mean – she must have been very dear to you, that she would be… displeased… with the gift you gave her, and you only sent her away.”

“Dear to me? She was my wife!” Dracula snarled – but just as quickly, his ire cooled and he seemed to sink down into himself. “But I’ve freed her of that burden.”

And in that one little fissure of melancholy, Lenore saw the chance she needed. Carmilla wanted to scheme their way into power by stealing the son, but it was such a risk! No, why not do things more elegantly, more peaceably? What inestimable favor could be won by returning the wife? At the least, enough to spare her, perhaps, if she swore she hadn’t known the plan.

“Freed her? Oh, no, my lord, I doubt it.”

“You will take care what you accuse me of.”

“Please! Be at peace, Lord Dracula. I accuse you of nothing.” She dared to take one tiny step toward him.

He lifted his chin – and his brow – but didn’t force her back.

“I only mean that we first heard rumors of our mortal Lady, oh, nearly twenty years ago? A couple of decades is not so long for us, but a very long time for a human to bear something burdensome. And so, I think it must not have been,” she rushed to finish before he could become piqued. “Could our Lady not have loved you as dearly as you loved her?”

Dracula stared down at her, brows pinched and lips parted to show one fang. “She attempted to starve herself after she realized what I’d done, so I am inclined to say _no_.” He stepped past her with just enough grace to land nearer to ‘brushed’ than to ‘shoved’.

“She must have been very scared!” Lenore told his back. She rushed to catch up with him, so quickly that her skirts rustled – a sound she usually deplored as graceless. “I was scared at my turning, and it was a rather peaceful affair.”

Dracula halted so abruptly, she nearly collided with his back.

“Do you have a meaning, or merely a death wish?”

“I mean, my lord—” Lenore stepped around to stand at his side. “—that you have your Isaac to confide your worries in. Did the Lady have a friend that she might speak to? Someone we might ask, to put your heart at ease?”

“…No. Do you think I am not _aware_ of what was said about my family?” Dracula asked her sharply. “Do you think me deaf and blind? No, she had no friend she might confide in. Where could she have made one among you false-hearted sycophants?”

“In me, my lord! I would never say such things.” She almost certainly had – but she wouldn’t be saying them now, which was close enough to the truth to be getting on with.

“ _You_ – how convenient, now that she’s turned and _gone_.”

Again, he began to stalk away from her. Aware that she was making a potentially fatal gamble, Lenore darted ahead of him in a burst of mist. She stared up into his glare and chose her next words with extreme precision.

“Please, Lord Dracula. Allow me to do this service for you, and trust me to speak with her. I make peace. It’s the talent I was sought and turned for. And even if I can’t reunite you – you’re tormented by the uncertain belief that she reviles you. Would it not ease your grief to _know_?”

His fury was quick to flare, and just as quick to die away. “This is…” And he sighed, and stopped, and shook his head.

She’d got a hook in him – she thought. It was good enough as a viable opening volley for any number of strategies. The most reliable way to gain influence over Dracula’s court remained to become the honored Lady Țepeș. It was unlikely, but still possible. He was quite taken with his bride, and what meager evidence Lenore had said that she was, at least at one time, quite taken with him as well; but it could all still fall apart, and when it did, Dracula would remember sweet, helpful Lenore who tried so hard to ease his grief. Failing that, the next best option was to become his favorite at court and turn his ear – impossible. That bloodthirsty Forgemaster of his wasn’t likely to be supplanted and trying would be suicide. He’d already lost one companion, another might enrage him beyond salvaging. But failing _that_ – why, if you could not rise to be the lady or the favorite… become the lady’s favorite. And if Lenore could overcome the foolishness of men to restore the current Lady Țepeș to her exalted seat, that would certainly be a favor not soon forgot.

“I implore you to think on it,” she told him – and then she held her hand out to him in a bold request to be escorted. “For practice!” she chirped when he only stared at her, baleful and still. “You’ll want to be a gentleman when reunited with your lovely lady fair, won’t you? You mustn’t live like you’ve lost the war already, my lord. It’s bad for your disposition. I think you’ve spent too much time around—”

“Around _humans_?” he growled.

She tittered in response, carrying an overtone of nerves as her knees trembled under her skirts. “Goodness me! Around _men_ , who are always toiling under the delusion that a woman’s heart is fickle when their own pride is what’s inconstant.”

Very slowly, like watching the first thaw, she saw Dracula’s shoulders unset themselves from their posture of rigid tension. He tilted his head a bit and narrowed his eyes – studying her, trying to puzzle her out. She smiled pleasantly at him, baring the little fangs that so often brought others to underestimate or dismiss her. And as she stood there, very still, he stepped forward to offer his arm with a different sort of rigidity, one that spoke of a lack of practice instead of a high temper. She’d rather his hand – to offer a hand was a cozy little gesture – but the formality of his forearm would do, as it was _not_ his claws into her gut and therefore _was_ progress, however small.

“This is, perhaps, not a conversation for a corridor,” he said as if half to himself.

“This is, perhaps, a conversation to be finished at your leisure,” she suggested. “After you’ve considered my offer to your satisfaction.” She took her place at his side and curled her fingers around his arm – low, her height providing the perfect excuse to slide them near to his wrist and draw his hand down. “But until you do, my lord, might you humor me in my little amusements? I truly think that they would do you good – a bit of rest for your weary mind, so that you might turn it sharp and fresh to your worries with tomorrow’s moon.”

“I am deeply uninterested in frivolities,” Dracula muttered as he led her – at a sedate pace that promised he was so worn he would tolerate them anyway.

“It’s good, then, that I have no frivolities planned,” Lenore soothed him. “Might I entreat you to show me around your magnificent castle – the rooms Lady Țepeș favored most, perhaps? If I am to talk to her, I should like to know her a bit first.”

He stared ahead, stony-faced, and so she continued—

“There is no shame in missing her, my lord. It’s to your credit that you care so deeply.” Or rather, to hers. “What’s the point of living forever, if that life is shallow and empty?”

“No point,” he said softly. “There is no point.”

“And I also wonder if I might beg the privilege of accompanying you on a chase.”

He looked down at her, eyes askance, and she could see the way he measured her up and wondered. Dear tiny Lenore, with her soft words and her soft hands and her nubby fangs.

“I’m sure it wouldn’t be as thrilling as when you hunt alone,” she demurred. “But I’m not quite so slow and fragile as I look. And I just thought… as your wife is new turned, it might be good practice for leading her?”

“...I’d rather she not see me at that business.”

“Then how would you like her to see it?” She squeezed his arm, just the barest bit of pressure. “It’s a chance to decide and rehearse, my lord, and present yourself at your best.”

“I… suppose that is true…”

As they walked, they approached Hector passing in the opposite direction, his dead cat dancing figures around his feet. He stepped politely to the side for Dracula to pass, but met her eyes with a flinty stare, his lips pressed in consideration.

She edged closer to Dracula as they drew beside him – she thanked him for the excuse, but he really out to have stood to the other side.

“Oh, please do take me, my lord” she begged, voice deliberately raised to carry back down the hall. “You get cloth so much finer this far east, and I’ve just had a new habit made up in the hopes that you might. I couldn’t wear it back in Styria – if Carmilla sees it, I fear she’ll be quite cross. It’s only that… oh, I hope I haven’t presumed too far, but surely Lord Dracula’s court should gather under his colors? We are all sworn to serve you, are we not? _However_ we can.”

“I suppose I might,” Dracula answered. “ _If_ your word is true.”

And Lenore savored her little victory – for Hector had the look of imminent meddling about him, and when a man was as grief-stricken and uncertain of his own heart as Dracula was, being asked, ‘ _are you… fond of her?_ ’ was sure to plant the seed even if it had never existed before.

* * *

A small commotion interrupted whatever reply Sypha may have had to Lisa’s statement.

Lisa was able to pick out small snatches of muttered words – ‘ _good sir, what has happened?_ ’ and ‘ _your leg, sir, is it well?_ ’ and ‘ _something queer in the woods, Speakers, and my horse has bolted._ ’

She also smelled blood. Fresh. Not much.

She stood. Sypha jumped to her feet after and grabbed at her arm, but there was not much use in dragging on a vampire, even a starving one – and there was just as little use in trying to stop Lisa with a patient at hand, as her vampire had often learned when he failed to drag her away.

She was no fool, though. She lifted the hood of her robes and pulled the cowl up past her chin.

“Is everything well?” she called to the elder as she rounded the wagon.

“Ah,” the old man sighed, and gestured to the stranger who sat in the dirt before him.

The man certainly had the look of someone who’d lost their horse in a tumble. There was mud splattered about his clothing, and a few obvious tears, though it was otherwise moderately fine. He had a bruise forming along his cheek and one of his ankles was obviously quite swollen, even through his boot.

“You’ve taken quite a fall,” she said to him.

“Damned horse spooked and fled,” he grumbled. “And I’ve had to stumble up the road on a twisted foot, before whatever scared it came out to get me as well.”

“That _is_ bad luck, sir,” the elder told him. “But you’ve made it to our camp, at least. You’ll be quite safe here.”

“No.” He shook his head and waved the notion off with his hand as well. “I’m not staying in these woods a moment longer than I have to. You have several mares here. Give me one of them and if you can find mine in the morning, you’re welcome to it and everything that was on the saddle.”

“That seems like a poor deal,” Arn grumbled. “If it got spooked by wolves, a half-eaten corpse is a poor trade for a cart mare.”

“There was coin in the bag on the saddle!” The stranger scowled. “You listen, Speaker, I’m a merchant, not a thief!”

Lisa felt it was a good time to step in before the discussion got any more heated. “What you are is injured. I’m a doctor. Will you let me take a look at that leg?”

He squinted up at her, obviously trying to see more of her face behind the shadow of her hood. “Don’t often see a she-Speaker,” he muttered to himself.

And Lisa realized that Sypha, very opinionated and always ready to talk, had said not a thing. Short hair and shapeless robes could only conceal so much if one spoke in what was obviously a woman’s voice.

“And you haven’t yet,” she told him. “I’m a—” _doctor_ , she nearly said, and remembered the beatings and the horror and the flames. “—wise woman, who these kind Speakers have agreed to escort on my travels. I have no poultices prepared for the bruising, but I can do something for your ankle.”

Lisa knelt next to him and lifted his swollen foot. He hissed.

“Strange bit of luck, to lose a horse so close to a camp with a healer.”

“Perhaps our presence unsettled a den of wolves, or a bear – in which case I do regret it, but the warning may save lives. Forgive me, but I must get this boot off before it must be cut away.”

He barely had the time to nod before she’d tugged it away.

“Warn a man!” he yelped.

“If I’d done that, you’d have tensed, and it wouldn’t have come off.” She felt at the joint until she was relatively confident it was nothing but a sprain. “We can wrap and splint this to keep it still, but you really should stay off of it.”

“I’ll stay off of it when I get to Târgoviște – at least long enough to get a wagon and get out.”

She paused. “Târgoviște?”

“I’m a merchant, as I said. I ride out to Târgoviște and return to Greșit with a wagonload of goods for the market. Strange rumors coming from that direction. Thought I’d avoid them on the quiet road.” He shook his head.

“I would not tarry in Târgoviște,” she murmured. “I’m not sure I would go there at all.”

“Do you know something, wise woman?” He leaned in, again squinting at her in the dim firelight. “Do you intend to keep your hood up in this heat?”

Lisa tugged the fabric further over her face. “Forgive me. It is… the custom of my husband’s people. He would not approve if I showed my face.”

“Ah. Pity.”

“I have doubts that we will find your missing horse,” the elder said. He met Lisa’s eyes and the quirk of his lips made it obvious he was stepping in to give her a reprieve. “But if you are so resolved to carry on, we will provide you with a mare. We couldn’t let an injured man walk the roads with wolves in the woods.”

The merchant shook his head again. “It _wasn’t_ a wolf. You ought to pack up now and hope you don’t see it.”

“If not a wolf, sir, then what was it?”

“Damndest thing. Obviously wasn't, but it looked like a deer.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This series now has a [TV Tropes page](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/TurningPoint), with thanks to InformalFallacy. So if that's something that interests you, do go check it out.
> 
> I also have a lot of little notes and research annotations piling up on my outline doc and wondered -- if I were to create a sort of commentary edition gdoc when this is finished, would that be something anyone is interested in? Please do let me know!
> 
> As usual, thank you all so much for taking the time to go on this little journey with me. I love hearing from each and every one of you <3


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And what was the other portion of the last chapter. Sorry for the short delay, it needed a little paint and plaster to fix up the gaps where I pulled them apart.
> 
> In this one, there's a lot of Dracula... well, being Dracula. So just be ready for that.

Dracula lifted himself through the top window of the gatehouse with ease and freed his claws from where they were embedded deep in the neck of the guard that was now gurgling helplessly and quickly fading from life. He licked his fingers clean with a pleased little noise.

“The cathedral _only_ ,” he reminded his attendant soldiers. “Do not fear the sham priests, they cannot harm you.”

Isaac and Hector were the last to enter, each carried up the wall by one of their night creatures.

“But _why_ the cathedral only?” Hector asked. “I don’t— that is— I’m not arguing for a slaughter, but did the people all not watch and cheer?”

“My love wanted me to improve their lot – to free them from superstition and fear. And so I shall, Hector. For too long I’ve let them build their petty little houses for their petty little god, because I did not care how the scurrying mortals amused themselves.” He lowered his hood and shook out his hair, and let the orange-red glow of sunset fall harmless across his face. “But left alone, they never learn. They never change. They cringe and cower and remain blind to that which is truly wondrous and awe-inspiring.”

“The men who cannot comprehend the world, for they see only its shadows,” Isaac opined.

Ah, Isaac always understood him perfectly.

“Yes,” he purred, “precisely. The church has become a bloated, stinking canker upon my lands, and it keeps my humans trapped as witless prey, for it and for me. But there is witless prey to be had the world over, and I am a lord, not a shepherd. Why should I keep cattle when I could have a court of alchemists and magicians, philosophers and inventors? Wallachia will be a land of learning, as it should have been the moment I took it for mine.”

It was… not what she would want – but it was what he could do.

“They might not want to learn,” Hector said. “They may refuse to be better. What then?”

“If they insist on living like animals?” Dracula asked. “Then they can die that way as well, like all their good priests and pious monks before them. But first, we will free them from their yoke and see what I can make of them, apart from dinner.”

From the corner of his eye, he saw Lenore tilt her head and give him a deeply considering look. 

“Do you truly believe that can be accomplished? Humans, willing to serve a vampire’s court?” she asked.

He gestured to Hector and Isaac. “It’s already done. The exceptional will gather where they’re free to live and practice their craft. Not all humans are exceptional, of course. But the others, ah – they will be better, or they will be bled.”

“A land free of the church and the hunters,” Lenore mused. “With willing human subjects…”

Dracula watched as the last rays of the sun burned crimson and died. “But first – the cathedral. I will show them how quickly their god abandons them for their crimes.”

* * *

Carmilla argued for secrecy. She argued for stealth. She argued for subterfuge.

“He has not _mentioned_ me?” Alucard asked, snide.

“No. He hasn’t.”

“Then he has not mentioned that he turned me out. I will not sneak into the castle that was, once, my own home.”

And to prove his point, he ascended the stairs and only just touched the great doors, which fell open under his fingertips.

Some of his father’s underlings were gathered in the halls – the same useless creatures that long derided him. They glanced at each other and tilted their heads to and fro like confused dogs.

“What?” He let his voice fall into the most boredly superior drawl he could muster. “I come to speak with my father. Where is he?”

Gone, of course, as he and Carmilla had planned for – but there was no need to let the rabble know that.

“Uh,” one of them finally managed. “He hunts, Master Adri—”

“ _Enough_.” He waved his hand to gesture them all off. “Then I will go await him in his study.”

He began to walk that way, brisk and purposeful.

“I think he might prefer—”

Alucard rounded on the soldier with narrowed eyes and bared fangs. “Do you give the orders in the house of Țepeș?”

The burrow-crawler wilted under his glare. “...No.”

With one last twitch of his lip, Alucard turned away once more. “I thought not. Come, Carmilla. My father’s study.”

“… _Well_ ,” she said, when they were sufficiently down the corridor to avoid being overheard. “I didn’t expect you to have it in you.”

“If you didn’t expect it,” Alucard said, eyes fixed on a point endlessly far away to not see the memories embedded in all the little nicks, scratches, and imperfections of the castle walls, “then one wonders why you approached me at all.”

* * *

The dead made poor witnesses, no matter how grand the spectacle. To avoid saddling his followers with temptation they were beyond resisting, Dracula led his forces across the roofs of the city to the cathedral’s towering stained glass windows.

The vampires all hung back behind him for fear of stepping onto holy ground – but Isaac and Hector stayed to his side, for the night creatures serving as their mounts could sense what Dracula well knew.

He stepped across the boundary with no fear.

There were no consequences that followed. No smoke, no burns – not a twinge of pain.

They brought his wife to this mock-temple, and they beat her bloody. He knew her scent, and he could still catch traces of it, spoiled and crusted and set into the stone itself. She was _not_ a pious woman, but she’d done them no evil. In their years together, she had turned his dead heart… not to kindness, no, but… to mercy. She had tempered his urge for wickedness, sparked in him appetites other than for malice, and held his attention so thoroughly that he thought of none but her. If they had _understood_ the woman they held, they would have falsified a deathbed repentance – they would have glorified her for gentling the devil’s heart. They would have made of her a martyr and a saint, and not a witch. Lies – all of it would have been lies, the one as much as the other.

But the truth would serve him well. The truth – that Lisa was a good woman, and here they had brought her, and here they had done something wicked and cruel with clear minds and false hearts, and spilled her innocent blood across their blessed floors.

And here, their god would shelter them no longer.

Where the wicked dwelled – there Dracula held dominion.

From his soldiers there arose a general chatter and hiss of excitement. Prey was at hand. A hunt like no other. They trembled with thirst – and as ever, Dracula would provide.

“Tear through them.” He didn’t need to order it, no, not to these creatures. “Leave none alive. Paint the walls with their blood. Decorate the spires. But the leaders – the bishops – leave them to me.”

“And what of the blessings?” Lenore asked. “What if they defend themselves?”

Dracula scoffed. “Would you have preferred to stay safe inside my castle walls, where the humans couldn’t get you? Don’t fear, Little Lenore. There are no holy men here.”

He looked over his gathered people one more time, sharp-toothed and hungry to the last. Yes, he would educate and civilize the humans in his lands – and he would educate and civilize the vampires as well, the cringing, slavering beasts. They all leaned forward, eager to see him burst through the window or summon a blaze of fire down upon them.

He stepped back from the ledge and fell, a shadow like a drip of ink in water, down to stand before the cathedral’s doors. These, he simply pulled open that he might step inside.

Oh, he had heard them when he rushed to save Lisa. He had heard them call him naught but the spells and illusions of a desperate, dying witch. The willfully blind clung to their flawed explanations for all things. But the devil did not need to appear in a cloak of flames and a roar of fury. No, so often evil walked among them in the guise of a man.

He was shamefully far into the building before the first of the priests noticed his presence. He waited for the man to turn and fully realize what it was he beheld, what widened his eyes and made his heart tremble and his breath shake from his lungs.

“Bring to me your bishops.” He took care to curve his lip to best display his teeth, so there could be no question about what had just walked, unharmed, into their inviolable sanctuary.

Behind him, all of his followers began to crowd inside. Some dropped, as he had, and some crawled down the walls. Hector and Isaac stepped to his shoulders, each flanked again by their chosen servants – Isaac’s, a massive bat-faced beast, and Hector’s, a lithe creature with too many eyes and oddly phosphorescent blue teeth.

“Oh,” the priest gasped through chattering teeth. “Oh Lord, save Thy—”

His plea ended in a howl and a grunt, and Dracula dragged his claws along the man’s ribs from the inside as he flung him to his loyal hounds.

“Kill them all,” he ordered. “None leave this building alive. Hector, Isaac – forge of them what you will.”

And from that command, chaos bloomed.

The archbishop, Dracula found deep within the building through a series of chambers that echoed with the hisses and laughter of his vampires, and the shrieks of their prey. He was a pathetic, bloated old creature with rheumy, drifting eyes and weak legs that tottered and failed under his weight and his fear.

“I didn’t order it,” he begged on his knees, as there were none to witness it. “I didn’t know.”

Dracula cradled the trembling thing’s chin and dragged his claw lightly underneath one wayward eye. “Oh, I know,” he crooned. “You’ve lost control of your flock, shepherd, and there are wolves within your walls. But you need not fear them any longer – the hunters are here.”

No man was truly fearless when looking death in the eye. They sobbed, they pled, they struggled and despaired.

He left the archbishop with his head in his hands, staining his vestments red.

His true quarry, he did not need to hunt. Hector’s pet dragged the bishop to him, chortling deep in its putrid throat.

The bishop struggled against his captor, kicking and flailing and brandishing a useless cross until he was allowed to wrench his arm free of the night creature’s grasp.

“Demon!” he hissed, flinging his hand wide.

Something wet and cool splashed across Dracula’s face.

“You cannot harm the righteous! Corruption may have let you enter while the Godless stood guard, but I—”

Dracula wiped at the liquid and laughed – water. Simple water. Blessed, perhaps, but certainly not holy.

The night creature snorted with mirth. “Abandoned by your God! The reward you’ve justly earned.”

It shoved the man forward into Dracula’s waiting grasp.

“You know who I am,” Dracula said, voice quieted with the promise of danger. “And now you will tell me truthfully – why did you take my wife?”

“Your wife?” The bishop’s bravado was rather strangled by the hand wrapped ‘round his throat. “A whore that fell into the arms of Satan.”

_A wh—_ This wretch! This useless sack of superstition and lies! This—! Dracula grit his teeth and squeezed only a _little_ harder. “Why,” he asked again, barely breathing the words, “did you take my wife?”

“A witch shall not—” The bishop grunted and kicked, his eyes beginning to dart and flutter. “Shall not be allowed to live, while the righteous—”

Dracula clenched his fist until his claws bit into the skin and something creaked and cracked deep in the man’s flesh.

“Why—” he hissed “—did you—” he squeezed harder “—take—” his claws met bone “—my wife?”

“She turned the people from God!” the bishop croaked through his failing throat. “She brought them the fruits of wickedness, and tricked them into delighting in—”

Dracula trembled with rage and shook his captive like a limp-limbed doll. “I will show you the fruits of wickedness!” he bellowed and slammed the bishop to the ground, which he met with a wet crack and a pathetic groan.

His chest heaved with useless reflexive breaths that only filled his mouth and nose with the scent of prey to incite him further.

But at last, he knew. At last, he had his answer, though he would never have peace. Why had this monstrosity been done? Why had Lisa been forced to suffer?

Because she was good. Because she was kind. Because they had also loved her.

Because she was right.

His vision wavered through a sheer film of red.

“Gut the building,” he ordered the night creature. “Rip out the pews. Build a pyre. He burns.”

“It will be done,” the fanged beast promised.

“They all burn,” Dracula whispered to himself. “They all burn, and I will build you a new kingdom atop their ashes.”

* * *

Alucard stared at the portrait of his mother with unseeing eyes. The coals in the fireplace were long dead and cooled. The pen on the desk had stains of ink crusted on its point. The pile of the fabric on his father’s chair had started to gather dust.

Had he been unable to face her after what he did?

Good.

Carmilla patted off the cushions and sat in his father’s seat like she’d assumed his throne.

He scowled at her, and she only laughed and shrugged.

“It’s rude to make a queen stand, my surly prince. Now – can you work your father’s mirror?”

“ _The castle’s_ mirror?” He crossed his arms and scoffed. “Of course I can. Can you not? Is that what I’ve thrown my lot in with, a petty queen from the hinterlands who can’t even use a distance mirror?”

Carmilla snarled at him, baring a significant flash of her teeth. “Of course I can work a distance mirror – _my_ mirror! They’re all _different_ , as I’m sure you know, and your father’s—”

“Well, yes,” Alucard said. “But if you only examine where the enchantment has been inscribed, it provides a key to the logic and the language employed, and from there it’s rather simple to—”

Carmilla stood all in a rush and leaned toward him, much less cozy than she’d been before. “Can. You. Work. The mirror? Yes or no.”

He leaned in as well, eyes bright and shoulders up, completely undaunted. “ _Yes_. I can work the mirror.”

“Then this is the plan,” she told him – not _rough_ , but not exactly cajoling either. “You will open the way to Styria and my soldiers, who are awaiting my word, will come through. One of my council is keeping the old man occupied. While he is out, we sweep through the castle and clear it of his people.”

“And if he returns?” Alucard asked, curiously uncomfortable.

The plan had appealed to him – in the abstract, as a series of flattering promises spoken in starlight in the woods. His father had gotten old, and unpredictable. He hadn’t – he’d promised to _save_ his mother, but he’d only broken and half-enthralled her and then discarded the both of them when his error became undeniable. Left his son – the son he tried to retroactively make a bastard because his word was law and he _said so_ – to clean his messes and salvage anything, _anything at all_ from the wreckage of their family.

But he stood under his mother’s painted gaze – piercing and clear and challenging, unburdened by the thirst or confusion that now gripped her – and he doubted.

If he returned—

If he came and saw the plot his forsaken bastard was helping to hatch—

If he—

His mother’s eyes burned his skin, and he turned away.

Carmilla tilted her head and studied him for a moment. “If he returns, then you fight. That _was_ what you agreed to.”

“Let us—” Adrian – _Alucard_ – licked his lips. “Let us suppose that he doesn’t. We take the castle. What then?”

“Well.” She grinned, sharp and hungry and vicious. “Then we _take the castle_. Assuming you can.”

“Take the…?” He took a step back and felt the phantom press of his mother’s disapproval. “I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if _anyone_ can. He calls it a machine, but… this building is bound to him.”

“Maybe it is,” Carmilla mused. “But so are you. I suppose we’ll find out, won’t we, my prince?”

“…I suppose that we will.”

She approached him slowly, heels tapping hollowly against the polished wood floor, and reached for his hand. “What, are you having second thoughts? There’s no need to fuss over it. We both know quite well what it’s like to languish under his neglect. You’re doing the world a great service. Don’t cry over it.”

“I’m not,” he snapped.

He didn’t care about doing the world a great service. The world had done nothing for him. He glanced back over his shoulder at the portrait of his mother and reminded himself of all that she used to be – and all that she might be still, if not for disaster. If not for his father. If they had never met, if she had never gone looking for him… well, maybe it would have all been better that way.

Dracula was a blight upon the world, an inevitable force of violence and madness that damned everything he touched.

Alucard would end it.

“The mirror,” he said, voice rough. “Quickly, before we’re caught out.”

* * *

Dracula was not three strides past his doors before one of his soldiers approached him with stooped shoulders and a bowed head.

“My lord,” the guard said – hesitant, with just a little quaver. “Master Adrian has returned, he—”

“ _Adrian?_ ” he asked, sharp as his mind, sharp as his teeth, and with a curious sensation of dread coiling around his still heart. “Alone?”

“N-no, my lord.” The guard shook his head under his hood. “With Carmilla. In your study.”

_With_ — Dracula mouthed it, silently. His… awareness… of his castle, of his blood, told him that Adrian was indeed home, although _not_ in his study, and not idle – and Dracula became suddenly and calmly aware that he was going to go to his son – his spoiled, callow, _selfish,_ **_useless_** _son_ and…

Snap…

His…

Traitorous…

Neck.

“Carmilla,” he growled.

Lenore surged forward to cling to his arm. “Lord Dracula, please,” she begged. “Please, you must listen to me.”

He turned to look down at her slowly. Little Lenore, who cajoled him into distractions. Little Lenore, who draped herself in his colors. Little Lenore, still smeared with blood from the evening spent giggling gleefully while she danced around his enemies.

She clenched at him with her soft little hands and pled, wide-eyed. “Please, just listen before you go!”

The stones of his castle thrummed around him, and he felt the tides of magic rising in his dead, cold blood. His red-eyed reflection glittered back at him from her wide, dark pupils.

“Oh,” he breathed, and caught her by the throat. “You poor little fool. You thought you could save this.”

She tried to burst into mist to free herself, but he was quicker and older and infinitely more clever. He wrapped her into his shadows and dragged her along as he bent the castle to his will and warped the space within it, drawing his goal ever nearer as he sped through his halls.

When he had done this with Lisa, it had been a calculated and careful thing to confuse and disorient her, but safely, watchfully – always with him placed to shield her and cushion her should she slip his grasp, as he’d have let her at the first sign she might marshal herself and _become_ herself again and not the fading shadow he’d made of her, before he damned them both to a life apart, though only himself to a life alone.

Lenore clawed at anything she could grasp as it flew past – doors and walls that groaned and shrieked under he claws, lights that buzzed and sparked and she ripped them free, the carpets, the ceilings, _anything_ , until the blood of the priests was worn away from her hands and replaced with her own.

It helped her not at all.

He burst into the mirror hall with such force that the doors splintered and ripped from their hinges to clatter uselessly to the floor.

Adrian froze, claws still raised to inscribe coordinates that trailed off into useless jagged lines as the shards of the mirror trembled under the force of their master’s rage.

How dare he— _how dare he leave her alone?!_

Dracula’s lips curled in a snarl and a deep, bestial growl built in his throat. “ _What have you done?!_ ”

Carmilla, wide-eyed and robbed of all bravado, seized onto Adrian’s arm, and as Dracula rushed them, claws raised, Lenore still trapped in his grasp, she staggered backward—

—and dragged them both into the portal, unstable, directionless, and half-formed.

The shards of the mirror tinkled as they wobbled in the air and fell to the floor – but only them.

Adrian and Carmilla were gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So that happened.
> 
> I love you all? I'm sorry?


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't have the time to sit and reply to all of your kind comments just at the moment, but until I can, know that I appreciate each and every one of them. <3
> 
> The ongoing warning for vampire-related gore continues.

Dracula stared at the fallen shards of the mirror and ignored the way Lenore clawed at his arm as his mind raced between three urgent possibilities.

Why would he leave her?

Find Adrian, demand answers.

 _Why_ would he leave her?

Question Lenore, discover the purpose behind Styria’s stillborn scheme.

_Why would he leave her?_

Go to Lisa, who was alone – after everything he’d torn from himself so that she’d live and be cared for, _alone_.

What… what first?

Logic stated that it should be Lenore, who was literally at hand. His heart told him to locate Adrian, because he – _augh_ , their naive little brat, their spoiled prince, _what had he done_? And yet the still-bleeding void in his soul demanded Lisa above all else, at the cost of all else, because he’d let her go with everything priceless and irreplaceable he’d possessed yet still it wasn’t enough, still she would—

Lenore freed him from his conundrum, as she freed herself and sank her laughably small fangs so deep into his wrist she bit bone.

He melted away and reformed across the room entirely on reflex, as surprised as he was furious.

“I was trying to _warn you!_ ” she snapped. “I was going to tell you!”

He shook his hand out, and spattered blood across the floor as his flesh wove itself back together. “How convenient for you, that you weren’t party to treason after all.”

“Oh, it hardly matters now,” she growled, pulling the torn shoulder of her dress back up. “I was fucking _abandoned_.”

Lenore first, then.

He shifted his weight and flexed his claws, but she threw herself across the room at him first, eyes blazing green.

“But I am done flattering and begging and playing the pretty fool!” She danced around his strikes with a speed born of desperation. “We couldn’t just listen to my plan for once! And now I— _ugh!”_

He caught at her dress and tore a large gash in her skirt. She made a fair attempt at kicking him in the head, and only barely missed.

“I am not laying down and dying—” her voice raised in pitch and volume as panic urged her on “—for a two-faced _bitch_ and a tyrant with a temper like a _feral fucking dog!_ ”

He caught her, and every instinct he had told him to _snapbitekill_. He shoved them down and reached for the lesser-used strands of his power. He seized on these and with them, he pushed. Lenore’s eyes first went wide, then glazed, and then fluttered closed as she fell limp and senseless.

His soldiers – his _Forgemasters_ , Isaac, thank _fuck_ – skidded across the floor as they tried to stop before the wreckage. Well, most of them. Isaac lept the shattered doors and bounded to a stop just within reach.

“What has happened?” he asked, dark eyes full of concern.

“Too much.” Dracula handed Lenore off to his servants. “Bind her. Put her in a cell. Do _not_ let her escape.”

Hector nodded. “Right.” He gestured for the others to follow him.

“Lord Dracula,” Isaac urged. “What of your son?”

 _His son_. He had a year of invective to loose on the subject of his _fucking_ son – but only one question.

“He left her,” he said as he gestured all the fallen shards of the mirror to rise. “Why would he leave her? How could he _leave_ her?”

His decision was made. He doubted Lisa would ever forgive him for it – but he doubted Lisa would ever forgive him for a great many things by now. What was one more? He scratched the symbols out with feverish speed as he began to narrow down the focus of his search.

“Why would he leave her?”

* * *

The magic that joined one point on the earth to another was precise and delicate and extremely temperamental without a properly prepared structure to act as an anchor.

It did not take well to being ripped into while partially completed.

Alucard hit the ground hard enough that starbursts of nothingness danced across his vision. He bounced, skidded, and rolled across ground strewn with rocks and fallen branches and a hundred other hard, jagged, unpleasant things to find with his back and his skull. When he was much younger – and when his mother was asleep or away, for she still had difficulties measuring the relative durability of her dhampir son – he and his father would play a game; Dracula would toss him into the air and then rush up to catch him at the top of his arc. Now, he felt like his father had seized him by the collar of his coat and flung him straight down from the telescope spire.

He managed one little breathless groan of pain before a red and grey blur rushed toward him. Quite on instinct, he brought up his arms and legs to guard himself—

And flipped Carmilla over his head and into the massive trunk of a nearby tree.

She fell to her knees with a muted grunt and stayed there, wobbling slowly in place, while she stared at him through the disarrayed tangle of her snow-pale hair with one bright, furious eye.

“You… stupid little bastard,” she hissed lowly.

“Me?” he asked, incredulous. “I’m the stupid one?” He slipped his sword from his belts and used the end of the scabbard as a cane to help him to his feet – so at least he still had that. Great. “You come to me with grand plans of usurping my father, and endless talk of how _I_ can do it,” he accused, barely above a whisper. “And then at the first sight of him, you decide you’d rather fling yourself to the void than face one tired, angry old man.”

He swayed on his feet and realized there was something hot and damp across his chest – a slice, clean but long, from his shoulder clear to the last of his ribs, with a little broken-off shard of mirror still embedded in his flesh. Gingerly, he pulled it free between two claws.

“With soldiers!” Carmilla roughly pushed all of her hair back out of her face. “With support! Not alone against—!”

“So what you mean…” Alucard sank to one knee, scabbard firmly in his grasp. He may have appeared to be resting, but he was tensed and ready to spring. And if not him, well. His sword hummed against his hand. “Is that despite all your grand talk, you didn’t believe I could do it. How foolish. What a waste.”

“No. We’ll figure out where we are, and then we go to Styria and marshal my troops and my sisters. From there, it’s only a matter of waiting for the correct moment, before—”

“Your sisters? Like the one you left behind? That sister?”

She scoffed. “Lenore is a big girl. She can manage herself.” It would have carried more weight had she not immediately look just a bit less certain. “She’ll charm her way to freedom, even if she has to throw me to the wolves to do it.”

“To the wolves?” He laughed, soft and low and bitter. “Maybe. Don’t you know, Carmilla, that you never cross the Țepeș twice?”

* * *

The stench of charred wood and charred flesh had Trevor doubled over on the side of the road, hands on his knees, to retch uselessly three times before he even got within spitting distance of the gates.

God, he’d never get past it, would he?

He’d go months, he’d go years, he’d think it had finally scarred over and stopped weeping, and then someone in some shit-brick hut would burn their bacon and everything would be ripped open raw and bleeding again.

And this…

This was so much worse than a bit of overcooked dinner.

It should have been fucking impossible to get into Târgoviște – but the men serving as the city’s guards were keeping the populace _in_ as much as they were keeping anyone _out_.

And once he was in…

“ _Fuck_ ,” Trevor breathed. He wiped his hands over his face and squeezed at his temples, like it was going to change anything, like it was going to make it better. “ _Shit_.”

What had once been the cathedral was still leaking smoke from the dark maws of its shattered windows, shards of glass clinging around the edges like glittering, multicolored teeth. The fire-blackened bulk of it loomed like a great hulking demon of stone over a square awash with a stinking mire of brown-red blood rotting and curdling in the sun, broken by islands of piled corpses and little hellish copses of the gutted and impaled. And in the very center of this swamp of nightmares was one lone skeleton, lashed to the remnants of the cathedral’s cross, with scorched flesh still clinging in places to its blackened bones and lumps and beads of metal gathered in all its sunken places from the warped and half-melted censers and bells and chalices and reliquaries all bound up with it to end in the same flames.

Trevor fought down another acid tide of sick rising in the back of his throat.

He’d thought he’d understood the malice of a vampire’s mind, but oh, he _really_ had not.

Nor had his father, nor his father’s father, nor their sire before them. Oh, they had told stories, gory recountings of the terrible deeds of Dracula – of towns razed, of innocent men lingering for hours while they struggled to die with wooden stakes threaded through their guts. But they had not _known_.

For Trevor gazed out at a scene from Hell itself, but stood on clean, untainted ground. Not bloodied. Not burned. Not touched.

The guardsmen – not touched. The people that stared, horrorstruck and dumb, from the windows and the doorways and the alleys – not touched. The vast portion of the fucking city, a defenseless vampire feast – not _touched_.

He used to think, when he was young and stupid, that if the vampires – that if Dracula – had not gone to ground and fell quiet, the good people would never have turned on his family. But it had only ever been a matter of time, hadn’t it?

_God. Shit._

He looked at the untainted ground beneath his feet, and the festival of fucking horrors a mere stride ahead of him, and hated that he understood exactly what he was looking at.

_Fuck._

“You, stranger! What’s your business here?”

Trevor tore himself away to search for the man who called out him – a rather rotund sort of fellow, flanked by two quaking guardsmen.

“Depends on who’s asking,” he decided precisely at the moment he spoke it. “And why you think I’m not from here.”

“Because the people of this city are too terrified to leave their homes, unless it’s to charge the gates, and here you are standing with your toes to the carnage. Do you have a name, stranger?”

He sighed. “Trevor. And I’m not a stranger. I’m a hunter.”

“A hunter, hm?” The man stroked his fingers over his beard. “Well, it’s daylight, so you clearly aren’t one of _them_.”

“Very sure of that, aren’t you?” Trevor drawled.

Both of the guardsmen suddenly found better uses for their pikes than as canes – namely, threatening him, so at least that was business as usual.

“Also,” the man added, “I’m the mayor of this city. I may not know them all by name, but I usually recognize the faces of those that live here.”

“Oh, no,” Trevor said, with absolutely no fear _or_ enthusiasm. “You’ve caught me. As I said, I’m a hunter, and I’m tracking something. Built itself a little garden of horrors in Lupu – or what little’s left of Lupu, anyway. Heard an interesting rumor.”

The mayor grimaced and covered his eyes with a sigh. “Lord have mercy,” he muttered. “He was supposed to be a legend.”

“Oh, good.” Trevor gestured out to the assorted grotesqueries on display. “So we do both know what did this.”

“Vampires,” the mayor said, muffled by his hands. “He was supposed to be a _myth_.”

“Pretty unfortunate time to think that,” Trevor opined breezily, as he stared out at the body half tied and half welded to the ruin of the cross. “Since the gibbering madmen in Lupu are saying you burned Dracula’s bride.”

“ _Tried_ ,” the mayor spat with sudden vehemence. “The bishop brought her, and he _tried_.”

“ _Tried?_ What do you mean, _tried?_ She’s not dead?” Because Trevor had some very firm opinions on witch-burnings, but if the woman wasn’t dead… Well, that would be a hell of a complication.

“ _He_ came. While she was still on the pyre. First as a face among the flames. The bishop called it the devil’s work – an illusion cast by the witch to try and save herself. And then something stepped out of the smoke and the shadows. The guards, they tried to charge it. And it did the devil’s work. Took Lisa Țepeș and disappeared. Whatever became of her, it didn’t happen here.”

“But something did,” Trevor said flatly. “And I’m pretty sure it’s the something I’m tracking.”

The mayor wobbled on his feet and staggered back to find something to sit on, a little spit of wall between the road and the square. “Last night. He came back – I know it was him, I saw him. Not alone. There were… maybe a dozen? A dozen, to do all this,” he sighed.

“Well, that’s what happens when vampires get involved. The weak ones, they just pick travelers off on the road—”

Off to the side, in one of the shaded doorways, Trevor caught some movement. A man – bit dirty, clothes roughed up, leaning heavily on a stick – got very interested in their conversation, very suddenly. But… he leaned out into the sun to better hear, and so Trevor dismissed him for the moment. If he were a scout – and they did use enthralled people from time to time – he wasn’t a supernatural one, anyway. So that could be dealt with as it happened.

“It’s when the old, strong ones get bored that these things happen,” Trevor continued. “Call themselves lords and ladies. Treat ripping through a town and leaving nothing but ruins and death like a bit of fun. A chase.”

“Mercy me, I believe it.” The mayor took off his hat and wrung it in his hands. “There was one – a she-beast dressed like a princess at court. Giggled the whole time like a little girl at play. We tried— we tried, at first, to stop them.” He shook his head “Kissed the first pikeman that tried to stab her and tore his tongue out with her teeth. Had to order a retreat after that. It was a panic.”

“ _A_ woman?” Trevor asked pointedly. “Not _the_ woman?”

“Lisa Țepeș? No. Lisa Țepeș was tall enough to look you in the eye, had hair the color of straw before the bishop’s men hacked it all off, and begged we all be shown mercy when the flames were lit. This was a little thing, red hair down to its waist. A demoness, it was.”

“A demon? No. Just what passes for a refined lady when vampires are doing the counting.” He sighed. “You know what’s strange about this whole thing, mayor?”

“What’s strange? Myths come to raze our city to the ground in revenge, and you ask me what’s strange?”

A woman… Revenge… Begging to show them mercy… Trevor turned the pieces over in his mind, and over again, desperate to make them fit together any way but they way they already did.

“Your city—” he pointed at the buildings around them, all but the cathedral “—is still standing. Apart from this mess. Which, uh. I wouldn’t try to clean up just yet, based on what I saw in Lupu. And what I’m seeing here.”

“And what _are_ you seeing here?”

With great reluctance, Trevor turned his back on the gaping empty sockets of the corpse in the center of the square, black except where the chain of a censer had been wrapped around its head and melted down, and the gilt and silver dribbles caught the light where they pooled in its hollow eyes.

The bishop that took the woman – Trevor didn’t _know_ , but he _knew_.

“Vampires and demons can’t touch anything blessed. But the only thing they _did_ touch was this cathedral, and all the good holy men in it. Now, either it was deconsecrated on purpose, which I am guessing was not fucking likely, or it was _desecrated_. The largest cathedral in all of Wallachia. The very head of the church. Desecrated. And either no one realized… or no one cared.”

“ _God_ _above_.” The mayor glanced out at the square and away again – several times, rapidly and feverishly. “So they came before we even knew and—”

“ _Vampires and demons can’t touch blessed things_.” Trevor bit out the words like he was chewing on his own frustration. “Which means that _men_ did that. So, Mayor. Your bishop went to Lupu and came back with a witch to burn. And then where did he take her? Into the cathedral? Rough her up a bit? Split a lip? Scrape her knees? Get a little innocent blood on your holy stones?”

Or had it started even before that? How long had the church been rotting from the inside while no one noticed? How long had his family toiled away for people that were already plotting their deaths?

Oh, he _really_ hated priests.

“Innocent?!” the mayor sputtered. “She was Dracula’s _wife_!”

“And you all knew that?!” Trevor bellowed, throwing his arm wide to point at the bishop’s charred husk. “You knew that before your bishop dragged her in? Or was she just a woman trying to help people in ways you didn’t understand, and that meant she had to die?”

“Mother of God,” the mayor gasped. But he wasn’t looking at Trevor’s face – he was looking at his chest, where his out-swept arm had parted his cloak to reveal his shirt underneath. “You’re a Belmont.”

“I’m a—” Trevor dropped his arm. For a moment, for just the barest of moments, he considered denying it and finally walking away from this whole miserable shitpile of a life. But… “Yes. I’m a Belmont. Trevor _fucking_ Belmont, last of the Belmonts. And I swear to _fuck_ , if you and your men decide to fight me for that when you have _Dracula_ gutting your vicars for a bit of sport—”

“You can save us!” Though it was said as a statement – half an order, really – the way the man leaned in, the desperation in his voice… Begging, when he was too proud to beg. “The Belmonts dealt with monsters! You know what to do – you can—!”

“ _Killed_. We killed monsters. But…” Trevor shook his head, and looked out once more to the burned wreck of the bishop. “That was before all the good men of the church decided we should pray more, and do less. You think I can save you? Whole generations of Belmonts fell under Dracula’s claws. Ten, twenty men and women – and if one made it back alive, it was a fucking _miracle_. And now it’s just me, and you might’ve done to him exactly what you did to us, and you hope that I can help you. Isn’t that funny?”

Neither the guards nor the mayor were pleased to hear that. The mayor, in particular, puffed up like an angry cat. Trevor clenched his fist, _very_ ready to toss himself into that particular fight and show them what would come of it, but—

“Wait! Sirs! Please!” It was the man from before, the one that was eavesdropping. He hobbled out to them as best he could when lamed in one leg. “Țepeș, that was the name of the woman? Because I’ve heard it before – in Greșit.”

Trevor and the mayor both turned slowly.

“Greșit?” Trevor finally asked.

“There’s a huntsman known to the town there, deals in skins and pelts. Odd fellow. Reclusive. But very tall, very fair. Adrian Țepeș, so he calls himself.”

“...Not a name one hears very often, Țepeș,” the mayor finally said, slowly.

“Your huntsman,” Trevor asked with equal consideration, “does he come out in the day?”

“Oh, yes. Hard to miss it when he comes to town. Sets the maids all a-titter. But he’s not the one I’m worried about.”

Trevor scratched at his jaw. “Woman with the same name gets accused of witchcraft and rescued by fucking Dracula, and that’s not what you’re worried about?”

The man shook his head and leaned in closer. “No, listen. I lost my horse on the road from Greșit. Got spooked by a deer I’d _swear_ was half dead. And then not a stone’s throw up the road, I run into a camp of Speakers. Well, you know what Speakers are…” He trailed off and glanced at Trevor with alarm.

Trevor, in fairness, was not _entirely_ sure what expression his face was making at the moment, but he’d put the last of his coin and a tankard of ale on it not being friendly-like.

“There was a woman with them,” the man rushed to add.

“Never heard of a woman traveling with Speakers,” the mayor mused.

Considering everything else, Trevor did not feel inclined to correct them. “Yeah, so?”

“A wise-woman, she called herself. Bandaged up my leg. Said the Speakers were escorting her on behalf of her husband – to Greșit.”

Well, that was a little more interesting, he guessed. But it wasn’t exactly what Trevor’d call urgent gossip. “Is there a point to this?”

“ _Yes_ ,” the man snapped, clearly wanting for a more rapt audience. “She kept her hood up the whole time – said her husband’s people wouldn’t be pleased if she showed her face. But she also said that she wouldn’t go to Târgoviște right now. Like she knew something.”

“Well,” the mayor mused. “There were Speakers here when— when the bishop… ah. They left fairly quickly.”

Huh. No. Trevor tilted his head and tapped his boot and thought – really thought, in a way he hadn’t been called to do for a long time now. There was something to this, some little sliver he needed to finally piece this all together.

“I didn’t get a good look at her, so I don’t know. But her face – seemed like I recognized it from somewhere. And her eyes – I shouldn’t have seen those at all, should I, if they were in the shadows? But sometimes they caught the firelight and they— they flashed, like. You know, like animal eyes?”

Animal eyes… yes. Like a very particular sort of animal, Trevor thought.

 _So the church picks up a doctor in Lupu, by the name of Lisa Țepeș. And she disappears from her pyre, saved by Dracula himself. Dracula goes to Lupu and he torments the people because they touched what was his. A healer is met on the road out of Târgoviște, headed to Greșit, where the name Țepeș in known. She warns against going to Târgoviște – and then Dracula does, and_ —

He glanced back out at the carnage and shook his head.

_She doesn’t want to be seen. She’s alone on the road, really. Speakers aren’t much of an escort, and don’t deal in almost anything the church accuses them of. But there’s a strange animal, and she has strange eyes._

“So I wondered, what if it was like you said? What if she was hunting on the road, and those Speakers were helping her?”

No. _No_.

“I need a horse,” Trevor said.

“What?” the mayor and the man both asked at once.

“I think you found Lisa Țepeș, and I don’t know if I hope I’m right or I hope I’m wrong, but either way, I need a horse.”

“What are you on about, man?” the mayor demanded. “Found Lisa Țepeș?”

“ _Look_ ,” Trevor said, and God, he never asked for anything, but please just give him this. “Sometimes, when a vampire takes a wife, it’s not a _wife_ , you understand? She’s a virgin that they keep enthralled to drink from. And if I were you, I’d really start hoping that that’s what happened here. Your church got a little over-excited – been known to do that – and put a captive virgin to death as a witch. Desecrated your cathedral – but just this one. Pissed off Dracula by shutting down his favorite vineyard. But there’s always more _wine_ in the world. He’s a monster. He’ll find another pet. _This_ —” he gestured to the bodies “—isn’t forever.”

“It’s never a good sign,” the gossiping man said, “when burning an innocent woman at the stake is the option you should hope for.”

“No,” Trevor agreed. “Because the other option is that she was guilty as sin, and you tried to kill Dracula’s wife. Whatever desecrated your cathedral – who knows how far back that was? And you need holy water and blessings to fight vampires. It’s not going to stop, and you have no weapons.”

“What do you mean, it’s not going to stop?”

Trevor looked the mayor up and down. “The good people of Wallachia killed my family in cold blood. I’m not sure I care what happens to them, and I was _born_ to this. I used to be a good man, once. You think Dracula ever was? You think he’s ever going to stop, when there’s no one left to fight him?”

He sunk to the ground with his head in his hands. “Christ almighty.”

“So get me a horse,” Trevor repeated. “And hope that I’m right. Because if I am, and I can save what’s left of Lisa Țepeș, then there’s hope that I can do something for you.”

“Save her how?” the man that found her asked. “What will you do?”

Trevor hated this part. He’d always hated this part, from the very first. “What do you do with a rabid dog? The only thing I can.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You didn't think I forgot about my boy, did you? Trevor hasn't had a good day in like a decade, and he's not gonna start now.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the wait, I ended up delaying this one a bit until AO3 email issues were sorted out. Everything seems to be coming through fine on my end now, so hopefully everyone subscribed will get the notif.

“Of course I always want to do what I can,” Lisa said as she made a basket of her borrowed robes to hold a bounty of meadowsweet growing by a little creek alongside the road. “But I am a doctor, not a magician. It’s not difficult to figure out what ails people, most of the time, but if I don’t have access to the right remedy there’s little I _can_ do except hope and, sometimes, help them die more comfortably.”

Sypha crouched down next to her amid all the little tufts of white flowers. She watched for a moment to see how, precisely, Lisa was gathering them before she reached for a clump herself. “And the meadowsweet is for…?”

“A compound can be extracted from it that eases pain and brings down fevers. If I had my equipment— but a tea will still do, I suppose, if given carefully.”

“Ah!” Sypha clapped. “Like willow bark!”

“Exactly like willow bark,” Lisa told her with a pleased grin. “As it’s the exact same compound.”

“But…” Sypha held up one of the flowers and stared at it as if it had just insulted her. “Lady of the meadow and a willow tree are nothing alike. I can understand them doing the same thing, but how can they be the same thing? How could you ever know?”

“Well…” Lisa plucked another stem, thoughtful. “You extract them both and you do a test. You don’t know anything until you’ve proven it.”

“That’s stupid,” Sypha said, flatly. “It is!” she rushed to insist before Lisa could argue. “How is anyone to know anything about anything if everything must be tested first – and how would you even know to test in the first place?”

“Because you test everything! That’s science. That’s how you learn things. People used both meadowsweet and willow to ease pain, but why? Once you know, you can—”

“They use them both because they work,” Sypha said wryly. “And they know they work because their mothers knew it, and _their_ mothers knew it, back on and on forever. You don’t need to test every last little thing about the world if you keep the knowledge that came before you alive.”

“Ah!” It was Lisa that clapped her hands this time. “Like magic.”

Bent over the clump of flowers, Sypha didn’t see her roll her eyes – but she did hop up with excitement at the mention of her preferred topic.

“Yes!” Sypha’s eyes were bright and sparkling. “Think of all that we could do, if the knowledge of magic hadn’t been stamped out so roughly. That’s why Speakers are important. We keep the memories that came before us alive.”

“Well,” Lisa said. “I don’t see the point of something you can know only if you already know it, or the right people to teach it to you. Knowledge should be for everyone. Magic is nonsense.”

“That’s not—” Sypha began.

But the snap of a twig and the rustle of a branch caught Lisa’s ear and a scent pricked her nose, and she held out her hand to hush the girl. Blood. She smelled blood. And that noise was not like the other noises of the woods at night. That noise was – boots. And boots meant a person. And a person making only a little noise meant a person that was sneaking up on them.

She pulled her hood up as she turned and tucked her chin deep in her cowl, for she could already feel her lips pulling back in an instinctual snarl and there was little she could do to calm herself.

A man was creeping toward them through the trees, keeping to the shadows – not that it did him any good, not to Lisa’s eyes.

He was maybe tall, maybe broad – impossible to tell. He’d swathed himself in a voluminous cloak topped with the generously furred pelt of some unfortunate creature or other. And underneath that cloak, he was armed. Very well armed.

A frisson of apprehension ran down Lisa’s spine. What need was there for a man with good intentions to carry so very many weapons?

She swallowed down the urge to hiss at him in challenge and just barely glanced back to tell Sypha to run – but Sypha was up on her feet and already darting forward to place herself between Lisa and the stranger.

“Aren’t you two cozy?” he asked, rough-voiced and low. “Step aside, Speaker. You don’t know what you’ve got yourself mixed up with.”

“What business could you have with us?” Sypha returned, as challenging as she was wary.

“None with you, so _go_.”

He gestured and Lisa caught a flash of something gilt across his chest in the meager moonlight, something that plucked at her memory. A crest, a sign, a mark that Vlad demanded she learn but refuse to fear.

Monster hunter.

_Belmont._

“But as for you, Lisa Țepeș – ‘fraid I killed your friend.”

For a moment her still heart seized and jumped into her throat – _Adrian, he couldn’t have, not Adrian, not her son—_

He swung and tossed something from under his cloak to land with a disgusting wet thump at her feet. She made out a flash of white and her throat clenched, but—

A skull. A doe’s head, with half its skull exposed, still attached to its long graceful neck that… that something had bitten at, furiously, savagely.

Something?

_Her_.

She had killed this deer, but that had been many days and many roads away from _here_ , just outside the reach of Greșit.

But she didn’t— she hadn’t— how had it—?

Sypha edged herself further between them with her shoulders squared and her chin high. “This woman has done nothing wrong.” She lit a guttering flame between her fingers.

“If that’s so—” The hunter twitched his arm under his cloak and the long coils of a braided whip unraveled into the dirt. “Then stand aside, and let me keep it that way. That’s not a person anymore, Speaker, no matter how prettily it plays pretend. Only one way to help a vampire.”

“You will not touch this woman,” Sypha insisted. “Not while I stand.”

“Do you have any idea what you’re defending?” He shifted beneath his cloak and his whip slithered across the ground.

“Do you have any idea who you’re hunting?” Sypha rejoined. “No! Because you didn’t ask!”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

The whip lashed out and Lisa struggled to jump aside as all of her veins seemed to fill with molten lead—

But it never reached her.

It wrapped instead around a glittering spire of ice that sprouted from the damp ground at their feet like a jagged frozen fang.

“Run!” Sypha ordered her.

But she could not.

She would not.

“Listen to me!” she demanded of the hunter.

He jerked at his whip and shattered the ice as he tugged it free, an explosion like so many shards of broken glass.

“I’m sorry,” he told her with shocking sincerity. “I’m sorry that you’re going to have to end like this, after what was already done to you. But Lisa Țepeș died in Târgoviște at the Church’s hands. This – this is not you being saved.”

And that was—

It was—

Some primal, incoherent anger bubbled up within her, like water from a spring or – or blood from a wound.

_Lisa Țepeș is a witch. Lisa Țepeș is a whore. Lisa Țepeș is a monster. Lisa Țepeș is_ ** _dead_**.

All of these simple little men, with their simple little minds, ready to decide for Lisa of Lupu what she would do and what she would be.

Save her by killing her.

Three times. Three times over she’d been given death like it was a gift and a blessing and expected to go meekly and softly, without complaint.

She clenched her fists until her claws pierced her palms and blood ran freely down her knuckles. A hiss built in her throat, low and soft and growing to an animal snarl.

Lisa Țepeș was dead?

No.

Lisa Țepeș was _done._

* * *

The vampire woman hissed at him, feral and furious, but it would take more than that to chase away Trevor Belmont.

He supposed there must have been something of a person left in there, that it took this long. There usually was, in cases like this. People that sought out the change, there was no helping them – they were monsters before they ever started, and they deserved to be put down. But people who it seemed had stumbled into it, or been enthralled after a bite too many, or just plain turned against their will? They had to be put down, too, but he hated it. He _hated_ it. It was the cruelest of all mercies.

“Come on,” he mocked the creature, with rather more scorn than he felt – he mostly just felt sorry. “I’m not afraid of you.”

It charged him, teeth bared and red-stained claws raised. He flicked his whip and then lashed out at it – the Speaker shouted – and—

And hit nothing but a billowing cloud of mist that rolled sluggishly around the strike, held together like a solid thing when it should have blown away. That was…

Trevor felt the beginnings of concern start to condense in the shadows of his mind.

The mist fell in a pool and slithered across the ground to rise up again some distance away and coalesce into the form of the vampire once more – still furious, still snarling, now with red beginning to creep across its eyes and irises so pale-blue they were nearly white.

That was not the sort of thing an accidental vampire should be able to do.

That was not even the sort of thing a _fresh_ vampire should be able to do.

At all.

That kind of trick was the province of the old, and the strong – and with vampires generally unwilling to share their power with the ones they spawned, the two went hand-in-hand exclusively.

Lisa Țepeș was supposed to have died, what, a month ago? Less?

The air filled with a strange thrumming, so low it was felt rather than heard, and the Speaker gave a little cry of distress – or maybe just shock?

But the vampire hadn’t moved. It still stood where it was, swaying gently as if mesmerized, fangs bared as it snarled and growled at everything and nothing.

And yet…

The moonlight, weak as it was, _changed_. He dared to glance up, just a flick of the eyes, and saw that the slim crescent of the moon was changing too. Red began to ooze across its surface, from the points inward, painting them like a pair of bloodstained fangs.

He’d grown up on stories of a vampire corrupting the world around them this way – _a_ vampire. Just the one.

Either Dracula had made one _hell_ of a mistake in the making of this one, or…

Or this was never going to end.

“I’m not afraid of you,” he told the creature again, rather more serious this time.

“But you are. Ignorant and afraid, just like the rest of them.” The vampire tipped its head back and laughed, throaty and mocking.

And then, in a flash of pale white-blue as hell-bright as its eyes, it was on him. It hissed, teeth bared right in his face, so close their noses nearly touched, and he felt its claws prick against his belly as—

As it tore his shoulder belts from him, strong enough to shred the leather asunder like gauzy linen, and sent all of his stakes and daggers scattering into the grasses swaying on the roadside.

“Well, you should be,” it promised, soft and motherly and absolutely fucking unhinged.

And it punched him so hard right below the ribs that all of his breath fled from his lungs as he went ass over tits into the creek and emerged, coughing and spluttering and very sure that the water wasn’t going to help him at all.

“Stop!” the Speaker begged, and a wall of ice sprouted from the ground between them, smooth and clear like glass. “You don’t want to do this!”

The vampire shattered it with one solid kick. “Don’t tell me what I want!” it snapped.

“You want to help people! You want to save lives! You—”

“ _Save lives?_ ” it hissed.

Trevor staggered to his feet on the slick stones of the creekbed. The vampire rushed him again, and he barely rolled clear.

“I tried,” it muttered, swaying in place once more, almost as if speaking to itself. “I _tried_.”

He shook his whip out and let the coils fall down for a clean strike.

As if it heard the soft whisper of the leather, it turned to him, its eyes both sharp and vacant with bloodlust. “But how was I thanked for it? I’ll save _myself_ first.”

He lashed at it again, or rather where it was and then it simply wasn’t. Another pale blue streak before it reappeared, between him and the Speaker. Always between him and the Speaker, he realized. That was how to herd it and pen it in, that was how to catch it where it was going.

“Another execution with no trial! No justice at all. Oh, I’ll drink, I’ll _drink_ ,” it crooned to someone that wasn’t there.

He edged around the both of them. If the vampire was _there_ , and the Speaker was _there_ , and he stood _here_ , then it would go—

“But not for _you_. For _me_. I’ll bleed this Belmont _dry_.”

He pulled back to strike, and the vampire rushed, and he had it, he _had it_ —

And a sudden gale buffeted the thing just out of reach of his whip, to tumble and skid across the suddenly frozen surface of the creek.

“ _No_ ,” the Speaker said, and widened her stance.

There was fire between her fingers and fire in her eyes, and the vampire recoiled and hissed.

“I will not let you do this,” she said, calm and resolved. “Neither of you. If it is to be _my_ story—” she glanced at the vampire with an expression he couldn’t decipher “—then _I_ will decide how it’s told.”

The vampire charged again, and fire and ice both burst from the ground – fire between it and him, and ice to try and herd it. But fire was not solid. Fire couldn’t block a blow. He couldn’t burn his whip, but he reached for his sword and—

And the vampire dove through the flames to kick it from his grasp and swipe at his eyes.

He was only barely saved by a spire of ice erupting at their feet and forcing them apart. He took what little opening he had and snapped his whip around, hoping to catch the creature somewhere, anywhere.

He felt it connect, and Vampire Killer—

Didn’t.

There was a chalk-white streak on the vampire’s cheek, just under its eyes, where it had been stung, but nothing else. He may as well have not even touched it.

“ _You_ ,” it hissed at him.

His whip slithered across the dirt as he readied it again. He didn’t hurt it. All right. All right. Blind it, lame it, snap its neck, anything to slow it down long enough to put a stake in it, _anything_ would work.

_Anything_.

The crack of his lash was deafening—

Except that seemed wrong.

A pillar of fire erupted between them, and he cursed that Speaker who—

Who cried out in shock.

And everything was stained with color from the firelight, but—

But the red-soaked moon grew fat and full and dark, deep crimson.

His whip struck _something_ and caught; something as sturdy and immovable as a mountain though he tugged and struggled ‘til the heated length of it creaked and strained.

There was a shadow in the flames.

Trevor had heard and survived the hissing and snarling of a host of vampires, and he and his family had killed them all, but they were a pale reflection of the noise he heard now, deeper in timbre and more murderous in intent. All of his hair stood on end with an awareness that had been bred into his very bones.

‘ _No need to worry about recognizing_ him,’ he’d been told when he was young. ‘ _You’ll know._ ’

Yeah. Yeah, he knew.

The flames guttered and died and left behind a towering pillar of darkness in the smoke and the embers, one with burning red eyes that held Vampire Killer wrapped tight around a raised forearm like so much useless leather.

“What do you think you’re doing,” Hell itself asked him, as hateful as it was composed, “to my _wife_?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lisa to Lisa: Aren't you tired of being nice?

**Author's Note:**

> Oops! you are all lovely angst goblins after my own heart and now my sketchy little vignette has sprouted itself some (bat) wings and taken off. I didn't expect that! Thank you all so much for your comments and kudos, they mean the world to me.


End file.
